It shows up from time to time. I know how I get it and I know how to get rid of it. But I don't know how to prevent it from happening.

Does anyone know what it's called and how I can stop it from happening all the time?

Thanks
Steve

http://i42.tinypic.com/zv9dhw.png

Could you elaborate more ?

I wish I knew what to call it.
It's a rectangular area of pixels that get disconnected from my desktop.
It happens when I browse a file menu sometimes, the rectangle area shows up at the same place and same size.
Like if I click edit on a web browser, maybe the rectangle will take the shape of the edit menu, and until I re-click the edit menu, I have this rectangle void that has strange properties.

Sorry I wish I knew how to explain it or even knew what to call it.
It's in the upper right side of the picture I posted on here.

Kevin

Ha, I see it now. It seems your desktop is not refreshed correctly for some reason
Does F5 key refresh it ?

Do you know the window manager you use ?

No f5 doesn't fix it and I don't know what my window manager is.

Metacity is one of my processes and I'm also using Compiz but to be honest, Compiz hasn't been working for me completely and I'm wondering if it's not disabled.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 with gnome
Kevin

Something to work with your config menu for Metacity then

I quickly looked on the net, saw maybe 2 things to test :

in a xterm run : metacity --replace
(this will disable compiz if it causes trouble)

And:
System->Preferences->Appearance "Visual Effects" None

I typed
: metacity --replace
in a regular terminal and my screen flickered.
I'm not sure if the problem is fixed or not because it's a random thing. I will pay attention and report back.

What is "a xterm"?

It's a window running a command line shell.