X-Recipient: archive-cygwin AT delorie DOT com X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_50,T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org X-Daemon-Port: 587 Message-ID: <4C420EE0.8010906@sylvan-glade.com> Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 13:13:20 -0700 From: Ray Simard User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051201 Thunderbird/1.5 Mnenhy/0.6.0.104 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Strange and sudden misbehavior switching to shell window (X) OpenPGP: id=7599038C; url=http://ray.sylvan-glade.com/pgp Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Hello. Something very strange has just started happening, and which I don't seem mentioned on this list so far. It is this: I customarily have at least one, and usually several, Cygwin-X bash shell windows open constantly. (I was briefly without that ability a little while ago and felt nearly crippled.) I've been doing that for years now. Over the past several days, when I attempt to switch to one of them with ALT-TAB or clicking the taskbar, usually nothing changes; the current window stays up. Sometimes the X window comes up after a long (maybe half a minute or so) delay. If I right-click on the X icon on the tray and try again, usually several times, or sometimes after just clicking back and forth among things for a while, it will eventually come up. Here are some key facts about this: 1. Sometimes, unpredictably, the problem will disappear and things will be normal for a while. 2. Cygwin installed from scratch about a month ago, with no problems until now. 3. bash shells in the cmd.com (non-X) windows can be switched to instantly without exception. Only the X variety has the problem. 4. Launching a fresh X shell window runs a little show but usually works OK before too long; I can't swear that it's slower than usual, but it might be. (Same with launching the X server.) It's only when switching to an already-running one that has the problem. 5. Nothing else seems to be out of the ordinary. 6. Uninstalling and reinstalling everything under the X11 subtree doesn't change anything. My immediate thoughts are: 1. Malware (Some kind of stealth X11 grabber?) NAV (which I keep for historical reasons), sysinternals RootkitRevealer and Spybot S & D don't turn up anything. I have sysinternals Process Explorer running all the time too, and see nothing untoward there, though malware can hide. 2. A failing disk. I don't think that's very likely, since browsing all over the disks in the system (there are several), particularly in the Cygwin intallation, the Windows home volume and temp areas doesn't seem unusual. The only way I can think of that a disk would matter here is if virtual memory were involved, and that would no doubt manifest itself in other ways as well. Any ideas? It's getting very tiresome very fast. Much thanks in advance. Ray Simard -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple