For the first second, the combination space-bar + left mouse button does exactly as it's supposed to. You can drag the view around. After about a second of holding, it appears that the space-bar repeat kicks in and the tool rapidly switches back and forth from hand tool to the tool in use at a rate that screws up the view drag functionality severely.

To recreate:
1. Open large image (2000x1500) in Gimp.
2. Zoom in so the edges of the picture overlap the boundaries of the screen, producing scroll-bars on the right and bottom of the window
3. Choose the lasso select tool, and begin selection click path.
4. Hold down the space-bar to move the view to continue selection path off current visible area.
5. Keep holding and watch the tool pointer go nuts as it rapidly switches from hand tool to lasso selection tool, and substantially screws up the view dragging operation.


I'm tempted to mark this bug severity as "major" since I use that functionality all the time, and it's a major bottleneck in getting things done. The only temporary way around it is to press-hold the space-bar for less than a second and "flick" the mouse in the direction I want to see, releasing just before the key-repeat kicks in. This gets obnoxious pretty fast, though. :)

I'm running GIMP 2.6.7 and Ubuntu Karmic.

Thanks, and once again, excellent work on the GIMP!