GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 756008
Window remains greyed forever after "Window does not respond" dialog
Last modified: 2016-10-18 11:52:44 UTC
It happens from time to time that a window becomes greyed, like what happens when the "Window does not respond" dialog is shown, and never goes back to normal until I close it. For example, I'm currently typing this message in a greyed Firefox window. This has been happening for several releases. It generally happens when my system is relatively slow to respond because of swapping or high disk I/O. I imagine this might come from a race condition that is triggered when the "Window does not respond" dialog is destroyed before it has appeared. Unfortunately, I have never been able to reproduce this on demand, but maybe knowing the code you can find where this kind of thing may happen?
I have found a way to reproduce this bug 100% of the time: you need to start an operation that will display a modal window for a long time (I do it with a self-made application with a modal progress window). Then, while the modal window is till there and the main window still greyed out, you switch to another workspace and stay there until the modal window disappears. Now, when you get back to the original workspace, the main window should look normal, but it doesn't: it stays greyed out forever.
For information, I've tested it with gnome-shell 3.20 and the bug is still there.
I think this is fixed in 3.22 . Re-open if it still happens with that version. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 752524 ***