Bug 995871

Sounds possibly like either video driver going bad or memory exhaustion.

Can you try to make a screenshot when this occurs?  (ksnapshot)

When/if this occurs, maybe try (temporarily or not) disabling desktop effects?  (Press ALT+SHIFT+F12 to toggle on/off)

How much ram/swap do this machine have?

[root@Johns-gx755 ~]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3909032    3074352     834680          0     349656    1371020
-/+ buffers/cache:    1353676    2555356
Swap:      3915772     181772    3734000


I don't think it's memory/swap, as I normally clear the problem by Ctl-Alt-F2, and doing:

# telinit 3; sleep 5; telinit 5

Then logging back in. I can run other tasks easily from the console shell. Being short on swap/memory would cause those tasks to fail.

I seldom have more than four windows active ... and Xclock on all desktops, konsole on desktop 1, Thunderbird on desktop 3, and Firefox on desktop 4. These tasks do not consume much memory/swap.

I will however do a "free" before restarting the windows system next time to confirm.

The windows system becomes significantly impaired when you can not use a drop down box or new tab/window to continue working. IE can not send a new email, because that requires a new window. IE needing to resize a window, causes it's contents to be lost. As long as you just click on links, or hit back, Firefox remains usable, if you do not need a dialog box or drop down menu. Shell sessions that exist in konsole remain usable. You can not left/right click to bring up a dialog/menu box ... even on the desktop.

Length of time to failure is variable, but typically less than several hours of heavy browsing while doing internet research. There are times when it fails again in less than half hour, repeatedly ... and it seems that rebooting the machine helps better than just a restart of the windows subsystems.

I have been doing a "yum upgrade" regularly for several months, hoping these issues would be fixed. All updates remain current.

Normally this machine remains logged in 24x7, updates are regularly applied manually each week or two ... sometimes it will go a month or two without a reboot, sometimes I may reboot it twice in a week if there is a new kernel update, or if this window problem is happening several times in an hour.

This machine as a desktop was dead stable on the prior release ... and was seldom rebooted ... uptimes in many months.

It was requested that I: Can you try to make a screenshot when this occurs?  (ksnapshot)

Please provide clear instructions to do this ... remember that I can not open another window/memu/dialog box on any desktop when this occurs.

Try running ksnapshot, it should be fairly clear how it works, though true, saving the produced snapshot could be troublesome to save the result if the dialogs do not work. :-/

updating summary

Well I started ksnapshot from konsole, and promptly got a nice black window pop up ... pretty useless.

[jbass@Johns-gx755 ~]$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3909032    3119048     789984          0     354984    1369528
-/+ buffers/cache:    1394536    2514496
Swap:      3915772     287208    3628564


[jbass@Johns-gx755 ~]$ top
top - 22:19:27 up 4 days,  6:39, 11 users,  load average: 0.03, 0.10, 0.18
Tasks: 203 total,   2 running, 201 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  3.8 us,  0.8 sy,  0.0 ni, 94.9 id,  0.2 wa,  0.2 hi,  0.2 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   3909032 total,  3112656 used,   796376 free,   355396 buffers
KiB Swap:  3915772 total,   287124 used,  3628648 free,  1360368 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                    
20067 jbass     20   0 2970m  38m  16m R   5.3  1.0  78:33.51 kwin                                                                       
19609 root      20   0  302m  87m  22m S   0.7  2.3  27:44.58 X                                                                          
20119 jbass     20   0  573m  31m  19m S   0.7  0.8   6:03.55 konsole                                                                    
20125 jbass     20   0 2065m 392m  44m S   0.7 10.3 133:08.96 firefox                                                                    
 5890 root      20   0  115m 1540 1012 S   0.3  0.0   0:10.79 top                                                                        
 6841 jbass     20   0  115m 1508 1444 S   0.0  0.1   0:05.64 systemd                                                                    
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.09 kthreadd

I also have this problem (black windows after some use), driver i915, intel g31, fedora 19.
Interestingly, I don't need to reboot to solve the problem: logging out and back in is enough (which is still massively annoying and incapacitating).

NOTE: this is probably the same bug as bug #949058.

If it is the same as  bug #949058, then we know when the problem was introduced, since that person suggests a particular update time, with a roll back request. I would agree ... this bug really sucks, and causes me to lose work regularly. Almost to the point of dumping F18, and rolling back to F16 where it was stable.

Well I had the problem on fedora 18 (before that I didn't use fedora), but it got much worse on fedora 19 unfortunately. Actually it's so bad that I'm considering buying a cheap ATI pci express graphics card.

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