GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 319435
sticky notes disappear at menu-click at high load
Last modified: 2006-04-18 14:12:03 UTC
Version details: 2.12.1 Create some sticky notes on the desktop. Perform some operation (e.g. compile mozilla) in the background that causes higher disk load on the system, so that most likely parts of the stuff required by Gnome are swapped onto the hard drive. Wait some minutes. Click on the menu of a Gnome application. The Menu Bar or Clock Applet on the panel are perfect, as well as a click on the menu of gnome-terminal, or a right-click inside the terminal area of this window can also trigger this bug. Since things are swapped out, it will take a longer time, let's say, around 0.5 or 1 second until the requested menu appears. During this time, when approx. 0.5 seconds have elapsed since the mouse click, the sticky notes disappear with the usual animation, just as if I clicked on the desktop (see bug #311644). This bugreport might sound a bit strange, but it already happened to me dozens of times, and only when it took a larger amount of time for the requested menu to appear. (I don't know if it matters: I do have an icon-cache, but it only contains the meta-data, not the images themselves (gtk-update-icon-cache -i). The machine: Intel P4 2.8GHz with hyper-theading (SMP kernel), 512MB RAM, 2GB swap)
Another similar situation, when sticky notes iconize themselves for apparently no reason, is when one of the commands update-desktop-database /usr/share/applications or touch /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache is executed as root.
A note to my original report: As I mentioned there, the bug arises whenever it takes too much time for a gtk/gnome menu to appear. There I mentioned some situations where this menu is apparently undependent from sticky-notes. However, it could actually be a sticky-notes menu. Just make sure things are swapped out (as discussed in the original report) and then either click on the X (close) button of a sticky note, or right-click on its title bar. The sticky-notes yet again iconize themselves, and then they cannot display the menu or dialog box they were just about to display. The sticky notes disappear and the panel applet no longer listens to clicks. With other words, the whole applet enters a state where it can no longer show its windows. So, if I want to see my notes again, I have to log out and then log in, or manually kill the stickynotes_applet process and let the panel restart it.
It's gone with Gnome 2.14. Closing as fixed (though no comment arrived from any of the developers who might know when and where this had to be fixed).