Please forgive me if this is the wrong forum. I have not managed to find any mention of my particular problem, and one has to start somewhere.

I am using KDE 4.4.5, on an AMD64 PC with NVidia Quadro NVS 295; the OS is Debian 6.0.6. I have configured some of the desktop effects: "Explosion", "Magic Lamp", "Mouse Mark", "Wobbly Windows", "Snow" and "Flip Switch" - the "Mouse Mark" and "Snow" don't work, BTW.

The strange thing is: if I start gnome-terminal and focus on it, navigate to another desktop and click on the background, then go back to the desktop where gome-terminal is and click on the gnome-terminal window, then that whole window disappears, except for the little fragment where the text cursor is. As soon as I click away from gnome-terminal, it is displayed again and works fine. Now, I'm sure this is all GNOME's fault, but what is going on here? It is at the very least an interesting phenomenon.

I'm not sure: compositing has changed considerably from the 4.4 days and I doubt this case would apply today. In fact, whatever the issue is, it is likely fixed in more recent versions.