Comment 5 for bug 1019395

I have had it every since the 11.10 Unity release. It affects menus and non-Unity system tray icon menus also (like shutter, empathy, reminna). I believe it is actually a Unity/Compiz problem rather than Network Manager specific. It definitely does not require a suspend/restore to happen, just enough time/activity.

What happens is after a period of use, usually less that a day, some kind of resource appear to run out or have leaked itself out. Then various things that require the resources stop works; so dynamically-created menus tend to be the first victims. The Network Manager VPN menu is definitely once of the most crippling because I know no work-around. Certainly no amount of restarting NM etc, will help. Logging out and logging back in again will fix it for a few hours, then you'll be screwed again.

I suspect, without any proof of knowledge, that the fault hits when you get close to needing to page or reclaim memory. I have 8GB and usually would be at ~7GB in used for applications/VM when it hits. That could just be coincidence though.

I have given up expecting any of major Unity bugs to get fixed, so I just live with it until I get my next laptop, which of course will definitely not have Unity. Maybe Mint, or hell, Windows XP would be a step up at this stage :-)

In the meantime, if anyone has any work-around that doesn't require a log-out I'd love to hear about it.