[solved] Borders and menu gone in XFCE... permanently?


diligentcircle

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I discovered something really odd and very bad in hotfix 5 (I don't know if it would happen in HF6). I'm not sure exactly what happened, so I'll tell the full story.


Oddly, there was a dynamic link in /mnt/utmp called "PanPlayer" (the same name as the folder for PanPlayer) pointing to /mnt/utmp/PNDStore. This prevented PanPlayer from running, so I did "sudo thunar" and used Thunar to delete the link. This fixed that problem, by the way, and didn't create any additional problems.


Unfortunately, I forgot to delete the link directly, so I then proceeded to empty the trash (something I always do if I inadvertently send something there). This is where things started acting odd: the bottom pane disappeared for a while, and so did a lot of other things. I thought I was going to need to hard reset, but then I got the standard "would you like to empty trash?" dialog. At this point, the menu button (the one in the bottom-left corner) and window borders were gone. I clicked Yes on the dialog, then, after contemplating a bit, decided to create a new FXCE menu and switch GUIs to see if it would help. I experienced a similar problem in minimenu which was corrected this way. But needless to say, that didn't work, and neither did a hard-reset.


So right now, XFCE works, but I can't move, resize, or maximize windows (even shift+click doesn't work), and since the menu has disappeared, I've created a new XFCE menu, which allows me to do stuff (though it looks a little bland; I wasn't sure where to find the icon that's on the default one).


I need XFCE to connect to a network, AFAIK (if there's a way to connect to a network in Minimenu, I'm all ears), but it stays connected after switching to minimenu, so I've decided I can live with it until the "final" HF6 is announced an then full flash, since I suspect that will fix the problem (maybe I'll just get the RC, but I don't want to have to update again if there's another RC, so probably not), but I do wonder if this problem has been experienced by anyone else, or if it's known of.
 
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I can't help with the borders, but does this help with the menu?
 
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Try running from a trminal xfwm4.

That worked! The borders are back, and when I switched into the minimenu and back, borders were still there!


But I'm confused. If the problem was that xfwm4 (I assume that stands for "XF Window Manager"?) wasn't running, why did the problem persist when I rebooted?
 
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Well, session setup is saved, it does mean if you closed a session without xfwm, running that option remains for next sessions. On the other hand when you started xfwm and closed session as you have seen the option is remembered for next sessions.


What I can't explain is why it failed at first.
 
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