Programs not accepting input?

[Rick C. Petty]

[ CC'd to hackers only ]

On Sun, Mar 26, 2006 at 05:50:09PM +1030, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> In the last month or two I've seen increasing occurrences of programs
> refusing keyboard input after they've been running for a while
> (between hours and days).  They still respond to the mouse.  At first
> I thought it was hardware, but it happens on a number of different
> machines, and only with certain programs, all of them X clients.

<snip>

> One thing that the machines have in common is that they all run x2x

I noticed very similar problems on both 5.4-stable and 6.0-RELEASE boxes
running xorg.  I've never used x2x, but I was running x11vnc, which I ended
up assuming was the culprit.  It's a really strange behavior-- I would have
two rxvts side-by-side, one accepting keyboard input and the other I had to
cut/paste text using the mouse.  It was even more frustrating when it
would happen in gaim & mozilla windows!  The same gaim process wouldn't
accept keyboard input in the conversation window but the buddy window did
responded to commands (e.g. control-A brought up the accounts window).

I was baffled..  The behavior was unpredictable but sometimes repeatable.
Once a window stopped accepting keyboard events, that same window would
continue ignoring the keyboard until I restarted that process.  At first
I thought it just affected GNOME apps, but when it happened to an rxvt, I
gave up and recompiled that system and stopped using x11vnc.

Sorry I'm no help, but at least I feel sane knowing it wasn't just me...

-- Rick C. Petty