Holding menu key causes window flood & desktop freeze

[vranki]

Try this:

1. Open gnome-terminal
2. Press & hold menu key ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/Kontextmen%C3%BC.jpg/1280px-Kontextmen%C3%BC.jpg )
3. Move the mouse pointer around

You can 'paint' over the terminal with menu windows. After playing a while the whole Cinnamon froze so that only mouse cursor moved and nothing else responded.

I am not sure which component is responsible for this. It does not happen on gnome-shell 3.8.4-8.1 so it might be Cinnamon specific issue. Tested with Cinnamon 2.2.13ubuntu1 on Ubuntu 14.04.

[Topperfalkon]

I think I managed to replicate this on Linux Mint 17 too.

As a workaround, killing gnome-terminal (using the killall command) seems to fix that.

[mtwebster]

Will be fixed by linuxmint/gtk#7

Interesting and funny story here:

The cause of this particular bug turns out to also be the cause of a six-month old security issue in the screensaver: linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver#44

The reason it is 6 months old (and considered non-reproducible by many of us, including myself) stems from the fact that no one was very clear as to which menu key was being referred to in the bug. And no one ever asked, including me. Many of us assumed the menu key they were referring to was Cinnamon's menu key (usually Super/Windows), not the actual vestigial menu key on the keyboard (that many keyboards omit nowadays).

Once we were using the correct key to reproduce, the bug was identified and a solution found in about 45 minutes, most of that the time needed to re-build gtk and test it.

The kicker is, when you first filed this bug, I got a laugh out of you posting an actual link to a picture of the key in question, thinking 'duh, I know what a menu key is.'

So, thanks :) And it just proves a picture is worth 1000 words.

[anandrkris]

@mtwebster Nice story and glad that we got this fixed. Even I assumed to be Super key when I read through the issue although I knew what menu key is!. Hubris blinds us, right ? 😉

I also try to reproduce that with Super key... so wrong...