I've been running Hardy Ubuntu and Compiz on my wife's desktop for the last ... well, at least 6 months or so. Suddenly, she came to me with a problem yesterday that everything firefox did was taking forever. Sure enough, even clicking on "File" or "View" could suddenly take up to 30 seconds to produce a menu. Told her to restart, but that didn't solve the problem.

Today, she booted up the PC, and not only was that still the case, but she was down to one virtual desktop (where metacity usually has 2 for her, and compiz usually has 3) and any window she opened was missing the title bar ... or perhaps(?) more accurately, the title bar was always hidden under the top gnome menu bar. Also, if she brings up firefox, no other application accepts input.

Firefox is v 3.0.4, and we're running kernel 2.6.24-22-generic.

To "fix" all this, I installed fusion-icon. I can then bring up a terminal first thing, type "fusion-icon &", close the terminal, and then use the icon to reload compiz.

After that, things seem to work fine.

Of course, on any reboot, we're back to square one.

I didn't see anything in /var/log/messages or dmesg or xorg.log or any others to clue me in on anything going wrong, but I admittedly don't know what I should be looking for in this case.

Any ideas?

One possibility: how large is the partition, and how much free space remains? How much swap space do you have, and how much of it is in use?

If the partition is almost full, you're running out of room to load graphics. If the swap partition is also almost full, that just aggravates the problem.

If that turns out to be the problem, you need to do some housecleaning. In your (and your wife's) user folders, in the hidded directories, you will find a number of cache folders to clear out. In the browser(s) you use there are also cache folders. Check /var/log for logs that can be emptied, deleted, or otherwise cleared out. Same goes for /tmp.

If neither of you has done such housecleaning, and if both of you use the internet a lot, you can probably reclaim a lot of hard disk real estate.

Great idea! I looked, though, and we don't have any partitions even over 15%, so that's not it in this case.