Offer to terminate unresponsive programs doesn't seem to work correctly

[diligentcircle]

So, when a program has been unresponsive, you get a message that offers to terminate the unresponsive program. For me, this has only happened with Firefox and Claws Mail, nothing else I use has ever been unresponsive long enough for that message to appear.


The problem: it doesn't seem to work. It sort of closes the program, but the borders and icon in the panel just sort of hang there, and I think I've noticed that I'm unable to start the program without rebooting when this happens, though I'm not sure. Here's a screenshot of a Firefox window after saying "yes" to the dialog:





In Firefox, I've learned to never touch these boxes, because it happens when I close it and Firefox always closes in a few seconds. But if I say yes to the dialog, it just hangs.


On Claws, it's even worse, because there's actually a problem there and it is actually locked up. So I can't use Claws any more because of this problem, having to reboot every time it locks up is just too annoying a risk.


Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[sswam]

Nope, but on a related note, I noticed if you hold down the pnd key for 3 seconds in a crashed game (under xfce), it is supposed to offer to terminate it. This has never worked successfully for me as of yet! Also may games get stuck or crashy if I press the "pnd" key, probably they lost the focus or something. It would be good if we can reliably terminate a crashed game under xfce, like we can in minimenu. Also some games when they crash leave an overlay framebuffer on top of the X desktop. We should remove any such overlay automatically when a program quits.


For your problem, can you see why the program crashed? Did it run out of RAM or what? Can kill -9 fix it, in a terminal?

 

[diligentcircle]

For your problem, can you see why the program crashed? Did it run out of RAM or what? Can kill -9 fix it, in a terminal?

Firefox doesn't crash, it just takes a few seconds to close sometimes. When this happens, that dialog pops up and offers to terminate it immediately, which I know I should never do, because it results in what you see in the screenshot in the first post (X borders stay there and the panel shows Firefox still, perpetually, until I log off).


Claws has only been locking up ever since I set it up with my Lavabit account, so I guess there's some relation to that. I have no idea why Lavabit would be causing it a problem, though. In any case, the real problem is that when it locks up and that dialog pops up, for some reason the regular kill menu doesn't seem to work on it.