Re: Application windows disappear when others are shown or closed

[rjaamour parasoft com (Rami Jaamour)]

It turns out this problem is only caused by Java applications running on
Sun JRE 5.0 (at least update 7), and it is not caused by the same
application running on JRE 1.4.2, so clearly it is related to an issue
with Java 5.0.

I will file a bug report with Sun (unless I find an existing one, which
I was not able to so far), but still I think gnome should not allow a
(broken) application to bring down other, completely unrelated
application windows. Why and how could this happen? Is this more of an
xorg issue rather than gnome?

> I'm using SuSE 10.1, which comes with GNome 2.12.2. The machine is an
> Intel x86-64, ATI x300.
>
> I have a strange problem where application windows disappear from
> without a trace while the process remains running. The problem affects a
> wide range of applications: nautilus, terminal, firefox, java apps,
> eclipse, etc.
>
> The problem is very unpredictable, but it usually happens when one app
> shows a dialog, closes a dialog, or when a window is closed.  These
> events suddenly kill the parent window of the same application and often
> kill other application windows too! Sometimes this includes the
> gnome-panel disappearing, and also all desktop icons.
>
> When I open the GNOME system monitor, I can see that the disappeared
> window processes are still running, but I can't find a way to resurrect
> their windows back to bring them to the front. However, if the window
> that disappeared is something like firefox or gedit, then these can get
> resurrected when I hit a link (to open a new tab in firefox) or open a
> new text document because as you know, these actions reuse the same
> running instance so it merely brings the current process window to the
> front; this tells me that the app process is still running fine, but
> it's just that its window is gone for some reason!  The disappeared
> windows are not listed in neither window selector or window panel.
>
> When I log off, I sometimes notice the disappeared windows flashing back
> quickly - but I'm not sure about this.
>
> My questions is:
> 1) on the short term, as a workaround, is there some signal or a way to
> tell a process to show its window again or bring it to the front?
> 2) Is this a known bug? Or is it an xorg issue, not a GNome issue? I
> tried googling alot, but with no success finding any similar results.
>
> I have a similar system at home on an AMD 32 machine, but without such
> problems.
>
> Please help! this is really hurting my productivity and if it continues
> then I may have no choice but to switch to Windows!! It keeps killing my
> eclipse and other apps!
>
> Thanks,
> Rami
>
>