GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 127917
Mouse "sticks" to titlebar when focusing unfocused windows
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
When I single-left-click on the titlebar of a window the mouse behaves as if I had never let go of the left mouse button. The pointer changes to the arrow with the plus sign and the window moves to wherever I move the mouse. This is surprisingly annoying and I would like to turn it off. Since I don't see any behavior specified in the Mouse preferences, I got the impression this was a bug. I am using a 2-button serial mouse with 3-button emulation turned on.
I'm not totally convinced this is a bug in metacity. Perhaps your mouse is just sticky... Can you reproduce this using a different mouse/different X server setup?
When I switch the mouse to a Kensington TurboBall (hooked up via USB) the problem happens very rarely. It is configured as a wheel mouse (USB) with 3-button emulation turned off (because it has 5 buttons, including the scroll wheel which doubles as a middle mouse button). But the problem doesn't go away. I'm not sure where the problem is but it does seem odd to me that the stickiness only happens when I click on the titlebar of unfocused windows. If the stickiness happened routinely no matter where I clicked in the window (like if my mouse had hardware problems), wouldn't I see some behavior indicating a more widespread problem (such as constantly drawing in graphical pixel-drawing apps like the GIMP, or constantly selecting ranges of text in a web browser)? And wouldn't I see this problem when I click on the titlebar of focused windows too? I don't have these problems. The focusing behaves normally if I click inside an unfocused window and clicking on the focused window's titlebar behaves correctly.
I've seen this some times on my box, and the bug has been reported in the Debian BTS by somebody else too: http://bugs.debian.org/246150
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 136587 ***