certain windows have their contents transparent

[KhaaL]

I've had this problem before in intrepid, but it dissapears and returns at will. Now it's back.

The symptoms are these: in virtualbox or smplayer, the contents are transparent in the window. smplayer plays the video but nothing is visible because its transparent. In virtualbox only certain things are transparent, for example during the BIOS black background when booting a machine is transparent (but not the text) or certain applications colors (see screenshot). When compiz is turned off, contents inside virtualbox shows. However, the video in smplayer is blank instead (this is with xv output module). I tried setting it to GL2, then the video output would work, but the starting screen is as transparent as with xv.This is with nvidia version 185.18.04, but occured with other versions of the nvidia driver, and Xserver 1.6.0

I tried a restart, and the problem problem is gone for now - windows contents in virtualbox and smplayer are showing normally now. Any suggestions to logs i could look into to get clues on this problem?

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Dependencies:

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: ubuntu-desktop None [modified: /var/lib/dpkg/info/ubuntu-desktop.list]
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-meta
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-020630rc4-generic i686
UnreportableReason: This is not a genuine Ubuntu package

==========================================
There is a workaround for this bug, before launching an application enter this command:

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

And execute your application. You can also make a script which would look something like this:

#!/bin/bash
export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
exec /usr/bin/smplayer.bin "$@"

[terdon (terdon)]

I had the same poblem and it looks like it is actually a bug in cairo-dock that is causing this. Check out this [URL=http://www.cairo-dock.org/bg_topic.php?t=2201]thread[/url] and my [url=http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7413258#post7413258] post on the ubuntu forums