I open the GNOME menu much as I do menus on MacOS (that is, the mouse button is down until I get to the item I want.) Unfortunately, the menu gets confused sometimes, and thinks I'm trying to drag items, even when I never leave the menu space. This may be a GTK issue, as I've seen it elsewhere.
The only way I know to do this is to use the right button to open the menu, then start a drag with the left button. Which is supposed to be a feature I guess. Using only left button, I can't make reproduce the problem. Can you give more details on how to make it happen?
It's hard to reproduce reliably, which suggests user error. My left mouse button (or my index finger :) might be headed south, and the menu might be thinking I've released the button. Maybe the fix is to not start a drag'n'drop unless the mouse button has been released for, say, 250ms?
DND is supposed to start if you move the mouse a few pixels with the button held down, if you pressed the mouse down on a draggable object. But in this case you did not press the mouse on a draggable object AFAIK, you pressed it on the gnome foot, right?
The menu thinks I'm trying to drag the submenu icons. AFAIK the GNOME menu can't be dragged.
OK, a theory presented by a coworker: your mouse is broken, and the buttons don't stay held down properly, so occasionally there's a rapid press-and-release sent to the menu while you're dragging. Most plausible explanation I've heard so far...
Do you think this is a usability issue, or does GNOME require perfect user input? It seems to me this belongs in the same category as being able to configure the double-click timeout, or being able to move the mouse diagonally into a submenu without losing the submenu ...
Well, GNOME requires working hardware. ;-) I'm suggesting your mouse has a bad switch in one of the buttons. Maybe try a different mouse and see if it helps.
Ok, maybe it's something I'm doing wrong, but it just happened running GNOME over VNC on a Mac. I have no problems using menus on the Mac, and on that platform I'd end up opening random programs if I were inadvertently releasing the mouse button. That doesn't happen, though, which suggests something else is going on ...
All bets are off if you're using VNC on a Mac - who knows... there could be bugs anywhere along the chain. Anyway, I can't reproduce this bug on any of the systems here. There is no way to fix it unless I can reproduce it (without running VNC on a Mac ;-)
I should clarify. I've had this happening on an x86 box running XFree86 3.x and 4.x locally; that was the original bug report I filed. I decided to try a different mouse, and that didn't fix it. I then tried running it remotely on Xvnc from a Mac, and the problem persists. So I don't think it's a hardware problem or an Xserver problem. I claim it's likely a bug in gnome, because 1.) I reported a similar bug in gtop, and 2.) I use Mac menus in the same way with no problems. I'll look further into it to see if I can find anything else that might be interesting.
I'm still seeing this in GNOME 1.4 (rawhide 20010831) on several machines. A possible solution might be a panel option to disable icon dragging entirely; I think it's safe to say that most other current Mac users will find the current behavior pretty obnoxious. (To reiterate and hopefully better describe the problem: on the Macintosh, menu items are selected by clicking and holding the mouse button on the menu, moving to the target, and releasing the button. The GNOME panel menus seem to get confused when I do this - opening a popup submenu under the mouse, the panel occasionally seems to think I'm trying to start a drag-and-drop with one of the menu items. When this happens, the game is over, and I have to close the entire menu and start again, possibly deleting the shortcut the panel created on the desktop. I don't think it's a mouse problem, because I see this on several machines and remotely across X11 and VNC.)
Owen do we have a GTK bug like this?
Well, the DND is a gnome panel panel feature, and not much in the control of GTK+. (Well, it's using GTK+ DND and GTK+ menus, but other than that....) I don't see how this could possibly be happening unless the menu is getting a button press event; I guess I'd have to see it in person to be convinced it was happening. :-)
I can't reproduce it at all either.
Ok, I'll try to find a more reproducible case of this. I actually only see this rarely, though I've reproduced it twice here in the past five minutes ... stay tuned.
At this point I think we should just figure this will go away when we upgrade to GNOME 2.