I've been having this strange issue with flash recently on KDE 4.4. Occasionally when I full screen a flash player, most often youtube, but also the player at penny-arcade, the screen will go grey. The video is still playing, but no video is being displayed, pressing escape to get out of full screen mode appears not to work, but according to the mouse cursor, it has. That is to say, when I move the mouse around, the various things on the screen change the cursor, be it text, links or images. Also I've tried to activate the "Present Windows" effect while stuck in this grey screen, and the mouse cursor also seems to suggest that the effect is enabled, but the entire screen is still just grey.

Most times to fix it I just kill kde by switching to a vt, and running "/etc/init.d/kdm restart". But I /think/ killing kwin and restarting it fixes things, though I can't be sure (it was a while ago the last time I tried it, I keep forgetting to try). And killing firefox AND nspluginviewer does NOT get rid of the gray screen.

I've been trying to trigger the problem again prior to posing this message, but I can't get it to do it on command. It seems fairly random. Sometimes it happens after a week or two of "uptime", and sometimes it happens after just starting up KDE.

Now I'm not trying to imply its KWin's fault, I honestly have no firm idea what is causing this problem, if it was firefox's or flash's problem, killing them should fix it, but it does not. Which leads me to believe its probably multiple small bugs, firefox+flash doing something strange that kwin or X/intel-xorg-driver isn't expecting causing it to get a little confused.

At any rate, I will do what I can to help track this down should a kwin developer think kwin could be improved to stop this strange thing from happening. Including testing patches and other technical things (I grok C, C++, patch, diff, SVN, CMake, etc).

Is this with Konqueror? Or does it happen with any other browser?

Marc Deop wrote:Is this with Konqueror? Or does it happen with any other browser?

I've been unable to use Konqueror for a while due to all the crashes and rather insane memory use. Maybe its gotten a little better since I last used it, but I doubt it.

But as I said, given that killing firefox /and/ the plugin itself doesn't fix the problem, it's probably related to kwin somehow (or possibly the intel X driver?)