Comment 86 for bug 805087

I had this problem repeatedly on Oneiric; couldn't see the trigger which caused it. However I appear to have found a solution following the suggestion above from Dylan McCall.

First, though a feature of my problem I didn't see noted above: when the launcher slides underneath the windows in the viewport, if they're not maximised, then clicking on the topmost overlying window, still launches the application from the launcher as if the launcher were the topmost window. Visually displayed at the back of the stack, but still at the front from the point of view of viewport events. (If an overlying window is maximised, then clicking on over the area where the launcher should be doesn't produce this effect.)

I noticed Dylan's comments about nautilus. I checked gnome-tweak and found I had "have file manager handle the desktop" turned off. However, rather than turn it on, I fired up gconf-editor and I found that "show desktop" and "show desktop as home" in the nautilus preferences were still enabled (the things you used to tweak to get nautilus to draw the desktop, and enable right-click on desktop). I disabled both - useless now as they don't bring the right-click on the desktop back - and since then I haven't seen the problem. With this, even killall nautilus doesn't precipitate the problem anymore and the launcher is well behaved.

Perhaps it's possible to arrive at incompatible gconf options at this point in the transition to Unity? I guess this shouldn't produce the effects above still, but I'm just happy to have a solution. Thanks Dylan! Anyone else experienced similar?