@leubking I'm slowly catching up to what you've been saying. Calling openGL with this

pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; plasma-desktop --graphicssystem opengl

wreaks havoc on the desktop. I'm seeing a lot of errors on Konsole when I call it- I could paste them here if you think that would be useful? (many many pages of information - is there something to hone in on?)

I just switched back to raster ... here are some errors it threw:

X Error: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter) 9
Major opcode: 62 (X_CopyArea)
Resource id: 0x2400191
X Error: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) 13
Major opcode: 60 (X_FreeGC)
Resource id: 0x2400191
X Error: RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter) 160
Extension: 148 (RENDER)
Minor opcode: 5 (RenderChangePicture)
Resource id: 0x2400191


Other stuff went off screen. Should I pipe to more (or less) and scan for something in particular?

Everything is displaying just fine right now. ...

Konsole continues to inform me:
plasma-desktop(11656)/plasma StatusNotifierItemSource::refreshCallback: DBusMenu disabled for this application

if that means anything.

Switching to 'native' also throws many of those X Error codes. But does not seem to be reporting this DBusMenu error.

thow wrote:Calling openGL with this

pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; plasma-desktop --graphicssystem opengl

lot of errors on Konsole

No need to post them, OpenGL graphicssystem is experimental and "broken" in multiple regards. Don't expect it to work reasonably.

I just switched back to raster ... here are some errors it threw:

This either means something is trying to perform native xrender operations on the raster system, where QPixmap does not carry a XRender Picture but more or less a QImage, or that sth. is operating on the wrong Picture type.
The outcome would be graphical corruptions.

Tried "XLIB_SKIP_ARGB=1 plasma-desktop"? Similar errors there?

After clearing the cache and then doing this

pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; XLIB_SKIP_ARGB=1 plasma-desktop --graphicssystem raster

or this

pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; XLIB_SKIP_ARGB=1 plasma-desktop --graphicssystem native

seem to generate the same X Error codes, although I have not checked carefully. In all cases the final information provided is a whole bunch of xml -- making it difficult to find potentially relevant info.

Staying in native -- I'm not getting any of those transparency black (or white) box rendering errors. I need more time to be sure. This is probably unrelated, but choosing the Activity Manager gives these errors in Konsole

ActivityManager::focusInEvent()
ControllerWindow::resizeEvent QSize(-1, -1)
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::setCompositionMode: Painter not active
QPainter::end: Painter not active, aborted
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::setCompositionMode: Painter not active
QPainter::end: Painter not active, aborted
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::setCompositionMode: Painter not active
QPainter::end: Painter not active, aborted
ActivityManager::focusInEvent()
ActivityManager::focusInEvent()
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Resource id: 0x2410627
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Resource id: 0x2410627
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Resource id: 0x2410627
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Resource id: 0x2410627
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
Resource id: 0x2410627

Just for closure here, I'll submit a final post on what has happened. I continued to get the problem described in this thread. This was all the more frustrating for me because when the visuals would start misbehaving was not predictable and I couldn't find a clear sequence of actions that would cause it to happen. I finally gave up (bah!) and switched to gnome. Interestingly, when gnome fired up for the first time, it seems to have detected issues with the graphics system and warned me about potential problems with gDesklets, and, perhaps even more importantly, it set me up with "Gnome Panel" rather than newer gnome constructs (Gnome Shell). Thus, I have "Applications" and "Places" for drop down menus in the upper left corner, rather than "Activities". E.g.:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/89901/ub ... r-launcher

This system has been working fine for a few weeks now. The GUI is, obviously, much simpler, but for this old desktop, does the job. If I ever get a new video card for it, I expect I'd be able to switch back to KDE. I *really* appreciate the patience and help you all have provided.

Thank you!