Comment 134 for bug 709461

Sam Spilsbury: Are you looking for a surefire way to reproduce the mouse dead zone? Because I can tell you exactly how to do it with the default settings for either the Ubuntu Classic or the default Ubuntu desktops.
1. Log in.
2. Open a terminal from the menu, and move it away from the center of the screen where the switcher will appear. Make sure that it still has focus.
3. Hold down Alt-Tab to activate and show the switcher.
4. While the switcher is still visible move the mouse to a point right above the very bottom of the gray switcher window. Within a pixel or two of the bottom is sufficient.
5. Click there. You will see that the desktop does not take focus, and the terminal window still has focus. If you run xwininfo you can click at that location and you will see information about a window that you can't see, and that is definitely not the background nautilus window.

I have noticed that this happens with both the "Static Application Switcher" and the "Application Switcher" compiz plugins, however it does not happen with the other switcher plugins. Perhaps because those do not use override redirect windows? It happens regardless of if you are using the unity-window-decorator or the gtk-window-decorator.

Interestingly, if you repackage emerald with the current code from the git repository (since the package from the natty repositories segfaults), it is unaffected by this mouse dead zone bug.