evolution hangs desktop when previewing/opening some contacts

Confirming, I'm able to reproduce it with the attached vcf.

I just upgraded to Natty and I'm experiencing the same bug. Would it help if I posted another example of a contact that freezes evolution?

I have a similar issue on two different laptops running 11.04 with the Unity desktop. The first is an HP netbook with a clean install. The second is my own laptop which is an Acer that I've been using Ubuntu as my only OS since 8.04. It was an upgrade from 10.10.

I do not have to do anything special on either machine to have Evolution crash my Unity desktop. On my own Acer laptop, I never even get to see the email program. The only things I can click on are the "File Edit View etc...." at the top when I hover my mouse. I then can go to File > Quit/Close to terminate the program. When the Evolution email program is in focus, it absolutely locks up the entire desktop and makes the pop out program menu on the left of the screen grind to a near halt.

It seems puzzling to me how a desktop change (one that I favor), can cause an email program not to function. This certainly needs to be resolved soon. Email communication is of top importance and I am dead in the water right now with exception to my phone which isn't too great for responding to many emails in a short and efficient amount of time.

I know I could be supplying more details of my install. I thought it was a fluke incident with the HP net book. Now that I know the issue is even worse on my computer, I would have to guess it isn't machine related so much as a bug in the software that has been introduced. Please let me know of any reports or other information that would be helpful to expedite the solution to this issue. I don't have constant access to the HP net book, only my own Acer laptop.

Thank you.

Could not see how to add this to my above post. Here is a desktop video of the symptoms described above.
http://nerdsonstandby.com/dwnlds/Video/evolution_U11.04_Hang.ogv

I have two computers, one on 11.04 x64 running Xfce (this is my main computer) and another one on 10.10 x32 running Xfce (this is a Netbook, Unity is way too slow to even think it could run on a Netbook). Ever since the upgrade to 11.04 on my main computer, things started failing really bad. Evolution is the worst so far, since it freezes the whole desktop. I have to switch to a virtual terminal in order to kill Evolution.

This seems to happen only on 11.04 and not on 10.10, and as described above, it happens whenever I go to the contacts and in my case, whenever I click, no matter where. For some reason, right after the upgrade to 11.04, it didn't have this problem. It came a few weeks later. Strangely enough, when the desktop freezes I can not click on anything, but my Xfce panels are still active and handle mouse over/out events (changes transparency) and the plugins are still working. The CPU shows no increase in activity (Evolution is idle) and there is no increase in memory usage. This strangely seems like a deadlock to me, however the fact the desktop does not handle any mouse or keyboard events when that happens lets me believe the problem might not only be in Evolution.

I think the poor state of some applications and libraries after the upgrade to 11.04 really does not help. For example, whenever I try to right-click on the desktop (running Xfce), it does not register until about 5 seconds later, and even so it does not show anything but simply removes focus from anything that might have it, just like when displaying a popup menu, but nothing is drawn. Also, my desktop background image is gone, and I can't really group select icons with the mouse on the desktop. As far as I can tell, the bug in Evolution did not come with an update of Evolution, but with an update of other libraries, and it also brought bugs in more applications, such as the one described for the desktop.

Hopefully, this was enough information to help track down this problem, let it be in Evolution or not. Please note that my Netbook running 10.10 is not subject to any of these bugs. All my packages on both machines are up to date as of today.

I forgot to mention I am running Ubuntu with Xfce, not Xubuntu, if that ever makes a difference.

Is there any way to delete the contact that causes this bug without using evolution gui?

The problem seems to be resolved in Oneiric, at least I wasn't able to reproduce it so far.

11.04 is not longer supported
change status to invalid

I have this problem with ubuntu 13.10 after imported some contacts from Xing VCF. The import seems right to me but opening some (not all) makes the desktop unusable:
- I cannot close the contact window with the mouse
- I can close the window with ESC
- but when I doubleclick somewhere on the desktop the closed contact window appears again even when i first show the desktop