I've just finished installing Debian for a friend who's just managed to
cobble together enough parts for a vaguely sensible spec of machine. He
hasn't got round to a monitor yet, so he's stuck with a 640x480
monstrosity. He's using GNOME 2 with the absolute minimum of panels, but
still many dialog boxes are larger than the height of the screen and unable
to be shrunk vertically. Metacity does not allow him to Alt+drag the
windows up far enough to access the options on lower halves of the dialog,
or those button things which actually make the dialogs useful.

I understand this misfeature may be motivated by the desire for users not
to loose the titlebars of windows off the top of the screen (or under the
panel at the top). However, if you're dragging a window around by it's
titlebar, it's surely not possible to put your mouse pointer off-screen and
hence the titlebar out of reach. If you're Alt+dragging, then you know how
to do that again to get the titlebar back down.

My proposal is that rather than preventing the titlebar of windows going
off the top of the non-panel screen area when dragging, the mouse pointer
itself is prevented from leaving this area. This will allow windows to be
positioned by titlebar or alt+dragging as the user desires, and should
prevent people being prevented from windows being lost irrevocably.

It may be necessary to move down or resize any windows which have their
titlebars in an area taken up by a newly appeared or enlarged top panel. If
that disgusts you, consider making the limit-by-mouse dragging a gconf
option (versus limit-by-titlebar), and go for whatever disgusts you less. :D

Regards,
Rob