GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 142057
Metacity inappropriately goes into window move mode on loaded system
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Switch to or from a busy window (Firefox is often a good candidate, but evolution is good for business too), either with alt-tab or a mouse click on the title bar. Sometimes (certainly not always: unfortunately I don't have a recipe to provoke the problem on demand) either the switched-to window (or perhaps the switched-from, with alt-tab?) will inappropriately go into "move" mode (cursor is small cross). Of course that means that the next mouse movement will move the window, rather than reposition the cursor somewhere over the window. This usually happens when I'm working hard, switching from window to window and tweaking things in several (overlapping) windows. It feels like a timing/race sort of problem. Could be related to the xterm opening bug that I'm about to submit against metacity...
I've done a little more investigation and have found that I can provoke this inappropriate switch into "move mode" with single, very short, clicks on the title bar of any window, even when the system isn't particularly busy. Well, I have a song playing in the background, using about 5% of my P-III/500, but that's all. I can do this fairly reliably. The window does not have to be the one on top, either: it can be partially obscured, although this does also raise clicked-on window. Another click will leave move mode.
Thanks for the bug report. To be more precise, this bug occurs when the click and release happen within the same millisecond. This has been fixed in metacity-2.8.1, released just recently. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 136587 ***