My panel icons keep disappearing

[fidesratioque]

Very weird. I'll be working on my computer when suddenly my panel icons will start to disappear. I can still click on them, I just can't see them. Is there a way to refresh/restore them without rebooting the computer?

I've attached a screen shot so you can see what it looks like.

The icons in my taskbar will also blank out (the black/bright white boxes to the left).

Any thoughts are appreciated. Am I the only person experiencing this problem?


http://www.geocities.com/fidesratioque/disappearing.png

[fidesratioque]

OK, stranger and stranger. K Desktop Manager crashed fatally. Now my desktop looks like this:

http://www.geocities.com/fidesratioque/disappearing2.png

[fidesratioque]

Further update: everything is back to normal after I switched compositing on and off repeatedly (alt-shift-f12).

Wow, so it must be some problem with compositing. Any ideas? I'll be filing a bug report, anyway.

[toad]

What graphic card you got? Which driver are you using? You might want to check the link in my signature - it has all the info you need to get NVIDIA or ATI chipsets working properly.

[fidesratioque]

Thanks for the advice!

I'm using NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver 180. Video card as follows:

*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GeForce 8400 GS
vendor: nVidia Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0 module=nvidia

[toad]

Search this forum for GeForce 8400 GS and see what others are experiencing. And because you've got NVIDIA I'd advise the use of envy as detailed in the FAQ in my signature. I'm on ATI, so cannot really give any further advice, sorry.

[fidesratioque]

Thanks, toad. Now if I use envyNG won't it make it impossible for me to get video driver updates automatically from the Ubuntu developers?

[toad]

Well, if it works, why would you want to hand control back to those who broke it in the first place ;D But as I said, check the forum first for there might be other pertinent stuff relating to your card!

[fidesratioque]

After additional investigation, I honestly don't think it's a driver issue. Here's the reason why: the error only began after I started using Amarok to stream audio. After closing Amarok and resetting compositing effects, the error immediately went away. Perhaps this has something to do with the Amarok memory leak I've been reading about?

What do you think? To me, this doesn't sound like a driver issue.

[toad]

I have no idea to tell you the truth. I am on ArchLinux with an ATI card. Here some other specs:


toad@deskarch 955\12 ~ > amarok --version
Qt: 4.5.0
KDE: 4.2.2 (KDE 4.2.2)
Amarok: 2.0.2

So I am afraid I cannot help any further :P

Best of luck though :)