Sounds like you have desktop plane or desktop wall effect enabled. You need to stop these effects.
How are you setting the effects?
The latest compiz fussion (compiz and beryl combined) uses the compizconfig-settings-manager.
Have a google and see if it availiable for your distro.
I think it is avaliable for ubuntu.
OpenSUSE includes it with the compiz-fusion one click install:
http://download.opensuse.org/reposit...sion-gnome.ymp