On some of my menu items or desktop links, when I click once, the program appears to launch twice - two entries appear in the panel. One entry will open successfully, but the other has this "bouncing icon" for a while, and eventually disappears. Why does this happen, and how can I fix it? Thanks for any help!

Running KDE on Suse 9.1 pro.

The bouncing icon is normal; it just indicates that the system is trying to launch the program. I don't think it can be removed...

Check your mouse. I had this issue once before, turned out to be my mouse. Switch it out with a different one and see if that fixes the issue.

Thanks for the replies, but that isn't it. I have multiple user accounts on the box, and it only happens to one user, so I can rule out the mouse. It's something I've managed to screw up about this one user - maybe installing software incorrectly or upgrading something or what - I don't know.

Again, the programs are attempting to launch twice (or so it looks). One instance will eventually come up, but the other just spins in the panel and eventually goes away. Imagine having your word processor launch and you're sitting there looking at a blank page, but the cursor is an hourglass because there is "another copy" still trying to open. That's what it is like. I've tried using ps aux while this was happening, but that told me nothing.

On a more general note, is there a log file somewhere that might capture what is happening? I have some other programs that will show this behavior, but never come up. I watch the hourglass for a while, and then nothing. I've looked through all the logs I could find, and don't see anything. I think all of this has to do with me attempting to install software and not getting it done right, but at this point I have no clue what the issue is.

It can be removed.

In SuSE, go Control Panel > Apperance and Themes > Launch Feedback then uncheck 'Enable taskbar notification'.. and I think you can leave the busy cursor enabled

Try launching the program from xterm or whatever terminal you use. Any errors should appear in the terminal window.

Thanks, both of those last tips helped quite a bit. Disabling the taskbar notification globally didn't exactly solve the problem - I still had to wait for the cursor to become normal, just couldn't see the second "instance" in the panel. But I looked at the menu editor again, and unchecked the "enable launch feedback" for the specific programs that were giving me problems. This seems to have fixed it. They open up quickly and with a normal cursor, and no second instance in the panel.

I just want to mention here that you haven't actually fixed anything per se, you have only changed KDE's behavior so that the problem is not visible. In the background, unseen, I am sure the same thing is going on. If you can live with this fine, but if you truly want to _fix_ this then more work is required. Heinz suggested to run the app from a terminal, which is good advice (and you should still try it), but I suspect the problem is with KDE's menu....as it tries to open everything twice.

On the user that this happens with, is it all programs? Or just a few of them. If it is everything you click on you might have that user set to open on single click and everybody else on double click.

Yes, thanks, good advice. I did try running it from the terminal before I changed anything. I went to the menu editor and copied the exact command line, then executed it in a terminal window. The app opened up with no problem. While I was in there is when I noticed the "enable launch feedback" checkbox, and disabled this just as an experiment - which ended up also working. So it must be a menu thing, like you said. And you're right, I still don't really understand why it behaves the way it does. I was going to see if I could find some threads that maybe explain what the launch-feedback is meant to do.

Normally I wouldn't see this as much of an issue, but I've been trying to install various progs outside of Suse, and my floundering attempts are evidence that I really don't know what I'm doing. For example, I somehow manage to have two versions of Firefox installed. On the other hand, some of the "preinstalled" apps don't launch, and I haven't had much luck creating my own links to launch apps. Back to the reading... need to understand more about X-windows I guess.

If this specific user accont is not important i would just delete the account that opens two windows and then replace it with a new one same name, password, ect...

definately a software issue and not hardware. BTW, is the account that it happens to "root" or just a "user". did you install gnome also? if you did, is the problem with gnome too?

The account is just a normal user. After my initial installation I set up several accounts. One of those accounts I've been messing around with... adding software, trying different things, and it's this account that wound up having the problems, so somewhere along the line I screwed up. The other accounts all work fine out of the box, so to speak. For example, in an untouched account, OpenOffice would come right up. In the "bad" account, it would take a while, and display that dual launch issue, with the bouncing cursor making me wait until the second window disappeared. Now that I've turned off the launch-feedback, it seems to be working ok again though. I'm not sure how this happened, because I never attempted to make any changes to Office. At one point I did launch the system update from this account, so my guess is something went awry with that.

yep, could be. when i started playing with linux i would do that sometimes, log in as "su" and then add or update. then i started to update, add drivers, etc in pure "root" and things started to work smoother. having fun now