Hi,

For some time now once in a while KDE completely hangs. Nothing
works, not even magic keys like CTRL-ALT-BCKSP, CTRL-ALT-F1,
CTRL-ALT-DEL. It was until now always completely inexplicable. I
never had a single clue what went wrong. I just logged in remotely
and rebooted the system. The hangs were really strange, because I
could not detect a pattern, and because I didn't do anything special.
Sometimes KDE hangs when I'm only moving the mouse! (Oh, btw, the
mouse can still be moved when KDE hangs, but that is absolutely
everything that happens. No screen refreshes anymore, and the like.)

Tonight it happened again. I was playing an MP3, and when I'm doing
that the mouse jumps a bit sometimes, because my compu is not very
fast. But now it jumped a bit strange, somewhere at the bottom of the
screen (over KPanel). A tooltip of one of my docked apps showed up.
And about that time: CRASH! Instead of just rebooting, I decided to
kill KPanel, because that's where my mouse was. (Of course I had to
kill it remotely.) And what do you know: the rest came back to life!

So now I still don't have a clue what goes wrong, but it seems
logical to conclude that it's something with KPanel (or one of its
docked apps?). Has anyone of you ever experienced something similar?
I think this is pretty serious, because if your computer is
stand-alone, the reset button is the only thing that works... And
sometimes it happens several times a week...

Oh, one other thing: when I killed and restarted KPanel, it occured
to me to see if there was a message in the X sessions log file. There
was:

X Error of failed request:  BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  61 (X_ClearArea)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x4000006
  Serial number of failed request:  3716
  Current serial number in output stream:  3936

I don't know if this was caused by the crash, or because I killed
KPanel, or something else. Now that I come to think of it, I remember
that I saw a window disappearing when I restarted KPanel, but I don't
know which one it was. Maybe it crashed because of the above error.

Stefan

-- 
Stefan van den Oord
s.m.vandenoord@student.utwente.nl