Sometimes gtk apps start to behave quite strange. Most menus doesn't popup (both main window menus and popups), that seem to happen with all gtk programs I use: gajim, evolution, freeciv, gimp... Firefox is an exception, the menus work correctly, but program ignores all key presses (I think that's because firefox reimplements his toolkit and uses gtk in a different way than other apps).
It all happens simultaneously. Just after logging in, everything works well. Sometimes after few minutes/hours whole environment starts to have such misbehaviors. It never affected single app; when I saw that one app is misbehaving, all apps started to do so. Everything returns to normal when I close all gtk apps I have. Closing f.e. only firefox windows doesn't help.
I work under fvwm-crystal (a set of configuration files for fvwm). All this never happened to other users of this computer, all of them use standard gnome.
That's all pretty weird and difficult to describe, I cannot find any cause or even any way to reproduce; I am filling this report in hope that someone will help me debug that or at least someone will verify this.
System is Ubuntu Feisty, updated regularly. libgtk2.0-0 is 2.10.11-0ubuntu3.
I forgot of one more thing. While the environment is in that broken 'mode', all gtk entry widgets (except firefox) don't display cursor. I can still type there, but i don't see the cursor.
I've just spotted a thing that may cause these misbehaviors. I use a usb-to-ps2 converter to connect my keyboard to the computer. It seems that this small device sometimes resets the keyboard. The keyboard lights its diodes for a second when that happens. I typed an url into firefox now and while typing the diodes blinked, then firefox stopped to accept key presses. My hypothesis is that due to keyboard reset a flag (possibly in gtk, fvwm, X or kernel) somewhere is set to wrong value.
I tried xev to get keyboard state from X, but then I noticed that I can type in firefox again; i think xev is so low-level tool that it could change that flag.