Strange window redraw problem - solved

[Dave Carrigan]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 01:27:57PM -0700, Dave Carrigan wrote:

> The deployment is going not bad, but on a couple of systems we're seeing
> strange corruption of windows: if an X window gets obscured by another X
> window, then raised to the top, the obscured part doesn't get
> redrawn. The window's frame gets redrawn but the contents do not. This
> does not appear to be happen if a non X window obscures the X window.

Up until today, I have been troubleshooting this problem over the phone,
and the people who were explaining it to me did not do a really good
job. Today I got into the office to see it for myself. The problem was
that the stacking order of the child windows was not getting changed, so
when the window appeared to get raised, the child window was not being
raised, so the window that used to be on top remained on top.

I investigated it a little further and determined that the internal
window manager was unable to connect to the X server over the unix
socket. All the other clients were connecting over the TCP socket with
no problem. When the internal window manager can't connect to the X
server, it can't manage the X windows. So, we ended up with the
wierdness we saw - the window frame, title bar, etc. would get drawn
correctly (because they are probably not drawn by the X server), but the
child windows that were being managed would not be raised and lowered
correctly, making it look like the windows weren't being updated.

I fixed our startup scripts to ensure that proper .Xauthority files
would get generated and it has solved the problem.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin-xfree/attachments/20040930/4c7409c3/attachment.sig>