My problem is when I open thunar to my pics folder and I want to scroll down to the folders starting with "s" (for example), the first time I hit "s" nothing happens. I have to hit it a second time.

The two problem OSs are xfce4 ubuntu 14.04.3 and 14.04.4. The reason I don't say they're xubuntu is both are originally lubuntu with a minimal xfce4 installation. I'm obsessed with getting my OS installations as small as possible and this reduces the final size by 0.5 GB. If it's of any value, I use this to install the minimal xubuntu:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xubuntu-desktop

I've also got clonezilla images of both xubuntu 14.04.3 and 14.04.4 and they both behave normally.

Any suggestions are welcome.
TIA

i can't reproduce that (thunar 1.6.3).
what happens when you press 's' the first time?

i think your problem is solely thunar specific, so it shouldn't matter how you installed it.

ondoho, thanks for the response. When I press "s" the first time, nothing happens. It has only happened to me when I convert a Lubuntu installation to xfce4. I've converted Mate systems and a Cinnamon systems and I don't get this odd behavior.

Actually, at this point I'm getting used to it so it's not a big deal. Thanks.

my guess is some LXDE processes are fighting over the keyboard input with some XFCE processes.
are you logging into an xfce session (you should), or how did you "convert" it?

ondoho, in my first post I included the code I use to install a minimal xubuntu desktop

Like I said previously, I'm getting used to it so it isn't big deal. However, this weekend I installed lubuntu 16.04 and did the minimal xubuntu install and that weird behavior is gone.

Edit: "my guess is some LXDE processes are fighting over the keyboard input with some XFCE processes."

With this in mind I opened synaptic and searched "lubuntu" and uninstalled everything found and did the same with "lxde". As per usual, that didn't work.

Thanks