GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 156009
modal dialogs open above context menus => desktop locked
Last modified: 2005-06-09 16:33:18 UTC
If a module-callback (i.e. authentification request) arrives while the user has a context menu open, the callback dialog might pop under the context menu. The callback window cannot be moved or focussed and the entire desktop including panel and hotkeys is locked (by the context menu which again is locked by the modal callback window I assume). If the ok/cancel buttons are hidden by the context menu, the only way out is CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE - losing all unsaved data. As unlikely as this might seem, context menus usually open somewhere in the center of the screen when using nautilus - which is exactly where callbacks popup. I've already run into this twice since gnome 2.8 is out, mainly because Nautilus browser mode is bugged and pops up an auth request for every single sftp remote location that is mounted into the vfs.
This is very much the same thing as bug 122688. ctrl+alt+backspace isn't the only option. You can switch to a console and killall nautilus (or whatever...) Still a pretty serious problem, though
This is not a gnome-vfs issue though. The standard authentication dialogs are in libgnomeui, but maybe it can be considered a nautilus bug. gnome-vfs itself doesn't do any gui stuff.
Christophe, I don't know too much about the implementation details of GNOME/GTK. For the most part, I'm just a user. However, the research I did before reporting this bug led me to believe this was a vfs issue and not a nautilus problem. I was also considering to report it to gtk+ as I would definetly expect the toolkit to make modal dialogs mutually exclusive or queue them within the process. If this bug doesn't belong here, could you or anyone else please make sure it reaches the correct bugzilla module? Thanks.
I think this is a GTK+ issue. IMHO a modal dialog should close all open gtk_menu_popup'ed menus on the screen as a consequence when being shown. Reassigning to GTK+.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 145416 ***