"The button"? Which button? In which dialog? Pleae try to give exact
step-by-step instructions to reproduce.

Created attachment 263837 [details]
Bug

Comment on attachment 263837 [details]
Bug

I want to bold text. But buttons in red frame (1 on image) are not working. After clicking on area with options - anywhere on that area (2 on image) the buttons in red frame are working. After clicking on "bolding" button, I can't click on it again, and on other buttons from red frame also (for example "italic" button). That also appears with "save" button and others.

I don't know why, but now I don't have this problem as often as earlier. From time to time I have to click on the background of window to activate button (of course if button doesn't work). Thank you for your work, Gimp is a very good graphic program. :)

Does this still happen with the latest 2.8.14 installer?

This started to happen to me a while back. I'm on Windows 7 x64. I have no idea what happened, but one day I couldn't click on ANY button. When I click a button, it doesn't get pressed but it gets selected (dotted square around it). I can hit enter and it presses the button.

Other things like the zoom drop down doesn't work with the mouse. Mouse scroll stopped working too. Plus, I noticed a lot of the icons went missing. The whole app seems to have gotten messed up somehow. I've uninstalled and reinstalled several times but that didn't work. For now, I'm using Gimp in a Linux VM.

This is still happening with 2.8.14.

Created attachment 289601 [details]
Video showing what happens when I try to click any buttons.

It might be something local to your systems - maybe similar to like e.g. Kaspersky's Antivirus blocks drag&drop within GIMP.

To clarify: unless someone of the affected users figures out what triggers this, we can't really do anything about it.

I'm using MS Security Essentials. I'm not sure what triggered this in my case. I've tried to remember if there was anything I did to maybe trigger this, but all I remember was one day all of a sudden I could no longer click any buttons in Gimp. If anyone has a suggestion of what else I could do to troubleshoot this I'd be happy to.

Someone on reddit reported those symptoms recently, and apparently (the reply isn't very clear about it) traced it to their anti-virus software:

http://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/2oi51z/what_is_the_fix_to_this/

I run Microsoft Security Essentials like I said. I've tried disabling real time scan and also adding gimp-2.8.exe to the exclusions. I get the same result - icons are messed up, I can't click buttons, mouse input doesn't seem to work.

Camtasia, Snag It, Camstudio, TuneUp Utilities - all of these are either confirmed or suspected to cause this as well - the fact that you could demonstrate this in a video might actually point to a screen grabber of some sort. This apparently happens even when not recording, just by running the software.

Now, the problem is: we have still no clue why this happens.

Hrm yeah, I don't have any of those installed. I used a Java applet just to take a video of the issue, but nothing is installed. But now that you say that, I might try closing every app I have down one by one just to rule them all out (VPN client, etc.).

Yes, this is a good approach - thanks for researching. I'll set the bug to NEEDINFO to indicate that more information will be added.

Brendon, did you find the trigger for the problem?

OK so I did some troubleshooting today. On a fresh reboot, Gimp would work fine for a minute or two, then the buttons would stop responding to clicks. Opening up Chrome or Firefox made this happen right away for some reason (at first I thought this issue was getting triggered by an app conflict so my plan was to open Gimp, then open my usual apps one by one).

I started to think that maybe this was being triggered by something related to graphics, so on a hunch I disabled Aero (I switched to Windows 7 Basic theme) and the problem went away.

If I switch Aero back on, the buttons go goofy again. This time I can actually switch tools (couldn't before) but they still don't respond to clicks the way they normally do. Sometimes the buttons won't respond to clicks, but if I click a couple times I can change the tool at least. Still very annoying and barely usable.

I've been using Gimp for a few minutes now with Aero switched off, and it's working totally as expected. If anything, disabling Aero is a workaround for people having this issue. I think you can do something similar with Windows 8 by enabling the Aero Lite theme and switching to it.

Hope this helps.

I'm experiencing same behavior.
If Brandon has right and Areo is cause of this behavior, windows 8 users stuck. You cant disable Areo in windows 8. 
I installed Gimp 2.6 and it works fine...

Same behavior exists in Inkscape ver > 0.48. 
Maybe it is a GTK issue?

Might be. But I'm not seeing widespread "GIMP does not work on Windows 8" messages everywhere, which I'd expect if this was a problem for each and every Windows 8 user.

Skype has been reported as causing this as well. Do you run this application, per chance?

Brendon, Darek, were any of you running Skype when this happened?

It's possible I was...in fact I'm sure I had it open all the time.

I still run Skype, but I close it when finished now. I haven't experienced this issue in a long time and I use Gimp for probably 1-2 hours per week.

There's probably some full-screen transparent windows in use with all this... and those cause mouse events to go missing in GTK+

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 780979 ***