evolution mail view stops updating

[Robin Sheat]

Every so often, particularly when going through a set of messages quickly (though it's hard to reproduce) the mail view pane in evolution stops refreshing. That is, it'll get stuck showing whatever it was showing. Content is being rendered there (I can tell because mouseover things still work as expected, you just can't see where they are) but it's not showing up. If I right-click on it, the image of the menu will remain there. If I hide and reshow the pane (ctrl-m) it doesn't fix it, it comes back but still nothing gets drawn there.

I'm not using compositing (I'm running xmonad), so that will influence some of these symptoms I expect.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: evolution 3.2.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Oct 20 11:44:27 2011
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=nl_NL:nl
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: evolution
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-14 (5 days ago)

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

I can't reproduce this issue, it might be specific to using xmonad...

Would it be possible for you to try out the same actions in the default window manager, so in Unity; or another such a xfce or anything else?

[Guilherme Salgado (salgado)]

Looks like what I'm seeing here... Can you confirm what you see is the same as shown on the screenshot? In this case I switched from the calendar view to the mail view but the selected message didn't get displayed where it should, so instead you see what was there before (part of the calendar)

[Robin Sheat (eythian)]

Guilherme, that looks exactly like what I was seeing.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Guilherme Salgado (salgado)]

I'm using Unity, and had the "HTML mode" config set to "Show HTML if present". After changing it to "Show plaintext if present" I've not seen this issue anymore. It's only been a few hours since I've changed it, so we'll see if that actually fixes the issue.

[Robin Sheat (eythian)]

It just happened to me again. I'm attaching a screenshot, which is interesting as it shows that the pane is still scrolling, just the content in it isn't rendering. The scrollbar moves when I scroll, also.

Just before this happened, I flicked to a different workspace, and when I came back, none of the evolution UI repainted until something caused it to happen (e.g. mouseover.) Then I changed message, it rendered, and then stopped rendering when I tried to scroll. The reason that you can't see the partial message in here is that I changed workspace and back again by accident, which makes it paint as the default colour.

Not sure if this is a useful data point, but it might be.

Note that this is almost certainly related to Bug #876055 that I reported shortly before this one, and is the same symptom but in Gnome Terminal.

(also, I think the launchpad janitor got it wrong, I suspect it's evolution or gtk or something rather than xmonad.)

[Robin Sheat (eythian)]

Changing to "Show plaintext if present" didn't repair it for me, I'll see if it prevents if happening again.

[Robin Sheat (eythian)]

It's still happening, and I've found an email that consistently reproduces it (at least, when I view it within my email.)