on screen display isn't truly transparent.

I should mention, the text is what is under the OSD, it will display what was under the OSD when the OSD came up but nothing that is typed after that.

half way through the sentence i tried to type text and it isn't showing. the text after "start typing" is what is hidden and that is where the bug manifests itself. it may be neccesary to know these are mp3 files, but i don't think it is a file format problem. this problem came up when i updated to 1.4.4 from 1.4.3

This has to do with how the OSD is created, in a sort of pseudo transparency. It takes a screenshot of the area under where the OSD will appear and then sets that as its background. Then, any changes underneath the OSD, such as window changes or typing text, will not appear until it goes away, since the screenshot is not dynamically updated as things underneath it are updated.

I think KDE 4.0 hopes to address this, and dynamic transparency is also a major goal of the XGL/AIGLX/Compiz direction we're seeing in linux. Until that happens, I'm not sure that the transparency thing will be resolved.

You mentioned that the problem appeared in the update from 1.4.4 to 1.4.3 Could you please explain this a bit more? Thanks.

correction: 1.4.3 -> 1.4.4

While I do understand the idea of "screenshot transparency" I just noticed this recently. This also happens on KDE 3.5.5 with Compiz/XGL and GNOME with no eyecandy. I am not certain that this happened when I was using 1.4.3 and to the best of my knowledge, Amarok used a true transparency. Perhaps this is not the case, but when I updated to 1.4.4 I began to notice every time this happened.

This is not just limited to Konversation, but it happens with any program.

The title should edited to read "On Screen Display has background error" or something similar. It does not lag text, but rather takes the background of what is on screen to do a psudo transparancy. This isn't limited to text typing or Konversation.

Sorry, at the moment thats just how 'transparency' works. wait until amarok requires composite.
but then again in the words of the famous nixternal
Composite is crap.