GTK applications freeze when switching windows

[Jan-Pieter Jacobs]

When having the gtk2-engines-oxygen theme activated, switching to and from a GTK application frequently will cause the app to use more and more memory, and more and more CPU time. This keeps on going, up to the moment where I need to kill the app because it bogs down the system by going into swapspace.

Both Emacs 23.3.1 and Firefox 13.0 present the same behaviour. I went looking for the cause, and switched themes. After switching this stopped. This made it clear that the problem must lie with the gtk-oxygen theme.

Uppon suggestion of from Ruslan over at bugs.kde.org I took the most recent version (1.2.4) for a swing, and this solved the issue.

Solution: Could you please bump the version of this package to the most recent one?
I saw a similar request already here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/oxygen-gtk3/+bug/991891 , but I really want to stress that this makes widespread GTK apps (think firefox) misbehave, and really become useless.

Thanks,

Jan-Pieter

1) Using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

2) output of 'apt-cache policy pkgname'
gtk2-engines-oxygen:
  Installed: (none) <-- had to uninstall to get the package build from sources installed using checkinstall
  Candidate: 1.2.2-0ubuntu1.1
  Version table:
     1.2.2-0ubuntu1.1 0
        500 http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/ubuntu/ precise-updates/main amd64 Packages
     1.2.2-0ubuntu1 0
        500 http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages

3) What I expected to happen:
Window switching without
  - excessive CPU usage
  - memory leaking
  - having to wait for apps to start responding after switching focus.

4) What happened instead:
  - Memory growing ever faster (Had Emacs with 1 open buffer growing to 2Gb)
  - CPU usage skyrocketting upon focus switch
  - Apps reacting slower at every switch.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.