Hello

The Gnome Quit applet is taking ~53 seconds to display the window with buttons for Log Off, Shut Down etc.

This behaviour started on ubuntu 8.04.2 around the time I installed lm-sensors; my best theory was that it's hardware probing had changed something. Jean Delvare, maintainer of lm-sensors, was open to the possibility but could not imagine the causative mechanism.

So I lived with it ...

Now I've just installed ubuntu 8.04.2 in a VirtualBox 2.1.2 virtual machine and it shows the same behaviour. That makes it much less likely that the problem is hardware-related because the new "hardware" is virtual.

Any suggestions to investigate/fix the problem?

A fuller description:

When the applet's icon is clicked the applet normally displays a window of buttons and dims the rest of the screen. The only action permitted to the user is to click one of the buttons, to hot-key to a text screen (ctl-alt-F1, F2 etc) or to restart X (ctl-alt-backspace).

The symptoms are consistent with the applet disabling everything as usual but neither dimming the screen nor displaying its own window. Hot-keying works as usual to get a text screen (ctl-alt-F1, F2 etc) or to restart X (ctl-alt-backspace). After waiting, when the applet's window does appear, it does not show the Suspend or Hibernate buttons (Hibernate only applicable on the real hardware system). If the Cancel button is clicked and the applet restarted, the applet's actions are normal, both in time to display and showing the full set of buttons.

I suspect the applet disables the Gnome GUI then makes enquiries to determine which buttons to display but this -- for some unknown reason -- is taking a lot longer than usual.

Best

Charles

An update: I switched from Gnome to Xfce and the Quit applet there works promptly. Still using gdm to get the login and session chooser, no changes to X, so it seems likely the problem is within Gnome.