[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#565383: xfce4-panel task list occasionally starts flickering after upgrade

[Josip Rodin]

Package: xfce4-panel
Version: 4.6.2-1

Hi,

I have a fixed-position normal-height 64-pixel-wide panel attached to the
left side of the screen, among others. In it, among other things, I have a
task list which is set up to do no grouping with fixed-width 100px non-flat
buttons.

After I upgraded from lenny to squeeze, the strangest thing started
happenning. All of the sudden, after starting some random program (which
would add another window to the screen), usually reproducible after starting
clusterssh (cssh) with a dozen windows, that whole panel would start
maniacally flickering, expanding and shrinking at a rate of at least a dozen
times a second, making it near-impossible to see or use anything on it any
more. The xfce4-panel would start consuming an entire CPU (together with X).

It would usually calm down and restore to its normal state after I either
closed or minimized all windows, but sometimes I needed to restart the
session for the problem to go away.

After some experimentation just now, I was able to figure out that it was
the task list that was acting up - when I accessed that panel's properties
via another one, and made it freely movable, it would halt its incessant
movement and it became apparent that only the task list was constantly
appearing and disappearing.

Removing the task list from that panel and re-adding it again with all the
same settings seems to have fixed or at least worked around the problem.
Sadly I haven't thought to keep the ~/.config/xfce4/panel/tasklist*.rc file
from before the removal (that occured to me just as I destroyed it :).
It was generated under lenny, that's for sure.

Hopefully it won't resurface again, but it was really annoying for a while.
Please make sure it doesn't happen elsewhere, if possible. TIA.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.