So... I was playing around with some desktop settings earlier on this Slack13-64 system, and at some point, for no apparent reason, my "double-click title-bar to shade a window" functionality no longer works.

I think I've narrowed it down to a problem with xfwm4, but am trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it :|

I can shade the window using the shade button, and I can shade it by scrolling the mouse-wheel on the title-bar, and I can shade it by using the upper-left-corner menu and selecting 'roll window up/down' -- those all work fine -- but if I double-click the title-bar, here's what happens:

All the open windows on the desktop flicker, showing the desktop below, kinda like I've minimized+maximized everything at once, and then I'm back to normal, except the window did not shade/unshade. I see in a console that xfwm4 spews out a segfault at this point. If I do this 5 or 6 times, xfwm4 dies, and all windows, including new ones I open, have no title-bar or border now.

If I re-execute `xfwm4` in a console, the title-bars and borders all reappear, but double-click-to-shade still doesn't work.

If anyone's experienced this crappy behaviour, I'd really like to know how to fix it; last time I had a Xfce screwup I ended up deleting all the configuration files for Xfce4 and starting fresh because I couldn't detect anything weird in the files. Now that I've got the desktop all set up how I like it, I'd rather not go through all that again.

Sasha

UPDATE:

I have spent far too much time in the past 18 hrs trying to sort out this mess.

As of now, I've deleted every single Xfce or xfwm4 configuration file I can find on the system, removed & reinstalled KDE and Xfce, deleted ~/.config and ~/.kde and ~/xfce for both user and root; reinstalled the entire /x and /xap sections off of the DVD, reinstalled my video driver, and just now, I reinstalled the entire OS from the DVD.

The problem remains. I can't shade a window with double-click on the titlebar.

I'm stumped, and frustrated and but I've got other things to do, and need a break from this madness, so the saga will have to continue later.

Sasha

Is this Xfce 4.6 by anychance?.
I tried it in Debian and found it quite buggy.
Maybe worth submitting a bug report?.

Yes, it's 4.6.1 IIRC, in Slack13.

It may be a good idea to file a bug report, though I at this point am not sure how much I can contribute to the "cause" of the problem, nor how to "reproduce" it.

What really irks me at this point is that the entire OS has been reinstalled, and the trouble persists. All I have managed to accomplish by trying to fix the problem, is resetting all my preferences to default

I will file a report anyhow, and see what they have to say.

PS - Now my Xfce Menu icons are half there, and half not-there. Ohhhhhh....... :|

Just out of curiosity do you still have the problem with KDE4?.
Have you considered any of the other possibilities such as Lxde or Fluxbox?.

KDE4 seems to be working normally.

I'm always considering other options, particularly Fluxbox; but I need to set my mind on spending some significant time with Fluxbox to get comfortable with it. I find it lacks some things I like (I'll go into detail later perhaps) which maybe can be implemented but again, I'm not familiar enough with it yet toknow if it can do everything I want, the way I want.

Something I am also interested in is "Maxx Interactive Desktop", an SGI/IRIX workstation window manager clone, which looks really nice; I downloaded it recently from SVN or GIT or something, but couldn't figure out how to build it or install it :/ lol. I am going to revisit that though, when I get some free time. Today is running out of time, and I have stuff to do that I'm not doing :P hehehe..

Here's a link: http://www.maxxdesktop.com/site/about/

Cheers!
Sasha

Thanks for the link,reminds me of Windowmaker a little:

http://xwinman.org/screenshots/wmaker-skyman.jpg

What do you think?.

Hmm, I can see some similarity that you are probably noting; especially those square launcher-things look very much alike.

I'm determined to get it built & installed somehow as I spent very little time on it last time. It kinda seems appropriate for my system -- dual nvidia cards, multiple monitors, and I use Xinerama. I'd like to use a few benefits of the compositor too, but Xinerama doesn't allow it, and TwinView doesn't allow moving windows from one monitor to another; I'm hoping maybe Maxx can allow me to do what I want. KDE is too bloaty lately, and I was really liking Xfce until it went haywire on me. LOL, back at square one.

Well good luck with MaXX,i'd like to see some screenshots when have it up and running!.
And in the meantime at least KDE is reliable for you.