lost window decorations during 10.04 -> 10.10 upgrade

[Jeff Abrahamson]

The upgrade paused to ask me if I wanted to update my grub configuration. The screen eventually locked, I unlocked it to find the dist-upgrade window and the grub update window, but both without window decorations. The grub window's button right corner was hidden (painted over) by the dist-upgrade window. I appeared to have no window manager present (cf. next paragraph).

Clicking windows didn't change stacking order. Keyboard input was being ignored as far as I could tell. Mouse interaction with still-live things worked: the scrollbar in the dist-upgrade window's terminal session was fine. Similarly, I was able to launch a terminal from the desktop icon, but then I couldn't type to it. On the other hand, right-click in the terminal's content area allowed "close window", which worked.

After an hour of (by then) intermittent random clicking and pressing of return and escape, something dismissed the grub dialog and the install continued. I presume some mouse or keyboard event was by good luck dispatched to the grub window.

The install appears to have completed correctly, in the sense that the machine has now rebooted into something that looks like 10.10 and is functional. I'm filing this bug from the machine on which this all occurred.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: update-manager 1:0.142.23.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-31.63-generic 2.6.35.13
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-31-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Dec 30 11:17:21 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.4)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LC_TIME=en_GB.utf8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: update-manager