Linux Mint 12 Freezes (Possibly Gnome Shell)
 

I've a new installation of Linux Mint 12 on my laptop. Most of the time it's fine but on occasion the screen flickers all of my windows disappear for just about 3 seconds and then return. When this happens my desktop icons disappear as well the task bar at the bottom of the screen and the bar at the top of it.

Usually everything returns to normal and functions as intended. Sometimes when the application windows return the borders look different, kind of like they're not complete, like the theme is being changed. When this happens I have no control over the desktop environment. I can't type, Alt+Tab doesn't work, Alt+F2 doesn't work either, I can move my mouse but clicking does nothing. If a video is playing or the system monitor is open they continue to run I just can't interact with them.

As a last resort I go to the first terminal and restart the machine. When the machine boots back up it functions as expected. I've also noticed aside from the freezes that when I click on a menu from an applications menu bar sometimes the menu looks like the yellow description dialogue box you often get when you hover over an icon except the text is in italics and too large to fit in the box. Sometimes when I hover over icons the description dialogue box with italicized text appears. I'll hover over the same button moments later and the dialogue box looks normal.

I have tried to activate a ATI/AMD FGLRX proprietary driver and a post-release update to it. After doing that the task bar at the top has rainbow stripes through it and the text in menus is often smashed together. Needless to say I've deactivated them. Does anyone else have this issue or any ideas on what I can do to resolve it? Also if there are existing threads regarding this issue I'd love tips on how to search the forums effectively.

Additional details...

Linux Mint is installed on one of the logical partitions on my second hard drive. I've got Ubuntu 11.10 installed on another partition and so far it hasn't had any issues like this. The remaining space on the hard drive is a Windows NTFS partition I use to share data between 3 OS's. Windows 7 is installed on my first hard drive.

Acer Aspire 8943G-9429
Core i7 1.73 GHz processor
8 GB DDR 3 RAM
ATI Mobile Radeon HD 5852 2 GB DDR3 RAM
OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB SSD (1st HDD)
Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500 GB 5400 RPM Drive (2nd HDD)

Linux Mint 12 uses "ubiquitous" (if my spelling is correct, since I have only ran this version two times). As I can infer from the way it shows up, it handles the apps and functions related to the desktop and windowing management. It is causing much trouble, and I am still convinced that version 11 is better than 12. If you want to obtain workarounds over it I suggest you go to the Mint forum and find out what others are doing about it.

I had the same sort of problems at 1st with Gnome3 but an update seems to have fixes it.
I installed ubuntu-tweak-tools & upgraded everything including the kernel.
Worked for me.