Title bars on windows disappear every 7 times the title bar text changes

This bug happens with me too, but sometimes it have a diferent behavior.

I experience the same problem.
Gusty. Compiz on Extra. Nvidia GeForce Go 7400.
I had the black window bug that seems to be common with the nvidia cards and compiz. Resolved that by enabling direct rendering.
The bug behaves just as discribed above. Title bar disappears on every seventh title bar update. Comes back the next time it's updates.

I have the same problem, but for me, it happens if the visual effects are on. if they're off, i don't have the problem. I changed something, and the problem started happening, but I changed it back, and it still happens.

For me, the bar disappears permanently (until i change back to no visual effects). it doesn't just disappear every 7th update.

Confirmed again, it doesn't seem to always be 7 changes though, but it's always somewhere around that number.

I can reproduce it by rolling over the min/max/close button or by changing the title by switching tabs. It does seem to be limited to maxamized windows though.

It only happens in visual effects settings above but not including None.

It sometimes partially draws the titlebar, maybe the icon in the upper right, or some streaks of color near the bottom.

Maybe this is some race condition that causes the titlebar to stop redrawing before it finishes, but doesn't invalidate it to draw again?

Interesting.. I hadn't noticed that it was only occurring with maximized windows but I see now that you're right. I'm also seeing it occasionally draw streaks of color and sometimes the icon.

However it does seem to happen to me almost always exactly every 7 changes. The only time I see it not happening after 7 changes seems to be when I cause it to change by moving my mouse over the buttons on the top right. In that case it always seems to be either 7 or 14 changes. (Including the change that brings the title bar back to normal)

I just checked mousing over the min/max/close buttons. I repeatedly moved my mouse on to and off of the min button. The title bar disappears after 5-13 times I do this.
When changing the text of the title bar (switching tabs in firefox) it happens exactly every 7 times. But the problem is definitely not limited to a change of title bar text, it's any redraw.

Me too. Fresh gutsy install. Again, only when maximized, and the 7 isn't set in stone. Card is NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS. I saw in this in Debian before the Compiz/Beryl merger so it is probably upstream in the original Compiz code. See my own screenshot attached.

Here's an interesting fix (sort of). I just changed to the Ubuntu Studio theme. (I didn't install Ubuntu Studio, just the theme).
The packages I installed were: ubuntustudio-gdm-theme, ubuntustudio-icon-theme, ubuntustudio-theme, ubuntustudio-wallpapers. Also, when you select one of those packages in Synaptic it requires a dependency (gtk2-something). I don't remember what package exactly. So I added 5 packages total.
I installed these packages and then selected the Ubuntu Studio theme under System->Appearance.
Maximized title bars no longer disappear! I can mouse over the min/max/close buttons, change tabs in firefox. Title bar stays. Problem gone.
It would be interesting to see which package is responsible for the change in behavior. Does someone want to install one-by-one and check it out?

This bug only occurs with Clearlooks and Clearlooks-based metacity themes so changing to another (non-Clearlooks) theme would fix it.

After some difficult searching I found this bug, which bothers me as well. I experience it on two Ubuntu 7.04 boxes with NVIDIA video cards. I'm a bit surprised an obvious and annoying bug like this one which affects so many Ubuntu users hasn't been picked up by the Ubuntu developers yet?

Travis, if this is in fact a bug inside the Clearlooks and Ubuntu's Clearlooks-derived ubuntulooks theme engines and not a Compiz bug, shouldn't we be filing a bug against gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks then? I haven't found any bug filed against that package yet, which is strange considering how well known this bug should be by now. Of course I could switch to a theme which doesn't use the Clearlooks or Ubuntulooks engine, but I'm quite fond of Human's orange.

Clearlooks-based metacity (not gtk engine) themes are triggering this bug but it's not obvious where the bug is. We're not ignoring this issue but it's hard to track down and as far as I know upstream believes it isn't their bug.

[Hardy 8.04 alpha-2 compiz] I have similar but not exactly same behavior. Installed version of compiz is 1:0.6.99+git20080102-0ubuntu1 and linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24-2-386, which are the latest available. Ubuntu is "up-to-date" i386 version. Running "Normal" effects with nVidia restricted driver, the latest new version added to Ubuntu repository yesterday. When I mouse over the controls (minimize,maximize,X) on title bar of a maximized window, a grey bar appears across the top of the title bar sometimes. It seems to be random. It never happens when the same window is un-maximized. Sometimes consecutive mouse-overs do it; sometimes not until 5 to 10 mouse-overs. Mousing over the title bar itself doesn't do it. The grey bar obscures the title bar and its controls all the way from left to right. Sometimes it's a few pixels high; sometimes half of the height of the title bar. My desktop background is the leather image, which is dark brown, so I'm sure the grey bar is not simply disappearance of the top portion of the title bar. If it just disappeared, I would see my desktop background, but I see grey instead. The grey has a vertical gradient, dark at top and lighter below, as though it is a shadow border of the top panel. I notice that the grey is not uniform height all across. It is wider on the left and tapers to narrower on the right.

It may be helpful if all of the bug reporters on this bug include in their comments the type of graphics processor they have so we can see if it only occurs on nVidia graphics. My computer has nVidia GeForce FX 5500.

Correction to my prior comment: When I mouse-over the controls, the grey bar appears every 1 to 5 times. Never more than 5 tries before the bar appears.
Another observation: When I un-maximize the window, as I said, I can mouse-over as many times as I want and it won't cause the grey bar to appear. This is true even when I stretch the size of the window to its full extent as though it were maximized, but still not in "maximized" mode. That makes me suspect that the problem is not in the nVidia driver, because I find it hard to believe that the driver would know whether the state of the window is maximized or not. I haven't studied the compiz code at all on this matter, but it's my hunch that maximizing/un-maximizing a window is the function of the window manager, not the graphics hardware driver. In any case, this observation should be another clue to the developers. Also, usually the grey bar disappears and the colored title bar restores to normal when I pull the mouse pointer off of the controls. However, sometimes I can pull the pointer off of the control and some or all of the bar remains. I can mouse around the window and the grey bar stays, until I mouse over the controls again and move off, then the bar disappears. So, sometimes the bar has persistence until the next mouse-off event.

I have added ubuntulooks to the affected packages since people are saying that it only occurs with that.

Also, to expand on my original comment, mousing over the title bar buttons makes this happen like every 1 or 2 times for me. Switching tabs in Firefox makes it happen about every 4 times.

FYI, the bug persists with the 169.09 NVIDIA drivers.

Oh, the behaviour is sometimes different now though with 169.09. Sometimes instead of the title bar going all gray/white, I get either a blue tint or literally nothing at all. See pics.

FYI, this happens way more often to me with the Human theme than with either Clearlooks or Glossy. On the latter two, mousing over the title bar buttons causes the bug maybe once out of every 10-20 times (compared to 1-2 for Human).

Interesting news. It turns out that this is not only on Clearlooks after all; I have now observed it on the Mist theme, which has its own engine. The frequency of the bug on Mist also seems to vary. Some times it can go for ages without the bug happening at all. Other times it will happen just as much as on Human. It also somehow seems to be dependent on the app somehow, because right now it is happening constantly for Firefox but not at all for any of the other maximized windows.

I have now observed this on Glider too. Again it somehow depends on the situation, b/c right now it is repro'ing on my Firefox and Eclipse windows just as frequently as with Human, but not repro'ing on anything else. Going to try Crux next.

I have now seen this on Crux, High Contrast Inverse, and High Contrast Large Print Inverse. That's all of the default Ubuntu themes now, so I think it's pretty clear: this is not theme- or engine-dependent. But some themes trigger it more often than others. I'm going to leave it open on ubuntulooks though since it definitely does affect that way more. The ubuntulooks people can mark it Invalid if they want.

Another interesting note: on Crux, which has fairly noticeable window borders, the borders are affected by this bug too. That is, when the title bar disappears, so do the borders.

Today I saw this on unmaximized windows for the first time, using the Mist theme. Pictures are attached. (Look at the terminal windows.)

I use the traditional UNIX style of focus switching (i.e., whichever window the mouse is over has focus), and I've found that switching focus by just moving back and forth between windows can repro this. Interestingly, it seems that mousing over the title bar's buttons does not.

Supremely ironically, the screenshots were taken as I was filling out a new bug report for a separate compiz bug. :(

No no no no no no. You have a different bug that is a problem with nvidia. It is not at all related to this. Please undo all of your changes to this bug.

Are you sure? You don't think we should see if the other reporters can confirm my findings? Unless there's some info that hasn't been relayed (like that this has already been tracked down to the Clearlooks code or something), then I don't see why these would be distinct problems. All the other reporters seem to be using NVIDIA cards too, after all.

Yes, your problem with pink or mostly transparent decorations is a different problem. This is obvious because the steps to trigger the bug are completely different. You keep expanding this bug to fit your problem when it should have been obvious that since you were getting a different kind of corruption in different cases this was not the same bug.

Very well. I have reverted my changes to the summary and description and deleted my attachments. The behaviour I see is now filed as bug 194933.

Are you sure this is a duplicate? The primary feature of this bug is
that the title bar and window min/max/close buttons are not rendered.
Bug 99508's does not mention this defining feature.

On Mar 8, 2008, at 2:41 PM, Travis Watkins wrote:

> *** This bug is a duplicate of bug 99508 ***
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/99508
>
> ** This bug has been marked a duplicate of bug 99508
> Window titlebar displayed not right with compiz enabled
>
> --
> Title bars on windows disappear every 7 times the title bar text
> changes
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/152493
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.

Yep, they're both about the same kind of titlebar corruption on maximized windows when using a Clearlooks-based theme. I've known for quite some time I had two of these bug reports but whenever I'd find one I'd forget about the other so they've been left separate for some time now.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.