51619 - Strange little windows are dangerous for your health

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect, P1)

Description

[Stephen P. Morse]

Many bug reports are appearing about modal dialogs with no parent windows.  
We've had problems with such dialogs for a while and it is well known that if 
you close down the browser before closing down an unparented modal dialog, you 
will crash.  For this reason, an attempt has been made to get proper parents for 
as many of these windows as possible.  But there are still some for which that 
has not yet been done.

As of this week a regression has occured whereby such non-parented modal dialogs 
cause a small mysterious window with gibberish on the title line to appear.  And 
if you attempt to close that window, bad things will then happen on future 
events such as crashes, hangs, etc.

Some bug reports which are now mentioning this mystery window are 51567, 50942, 
and 51338.  So I'm trying to isolate the mystery-window part of those bug 
reports and make it into its own separate bug.

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

adding crash keyword.  Classic summary, Daniel's gonna love this one..

Comment 2

[Peter Trudelle]

nsbeta3+/P1, since blocked bugs already are.
Adding 44145 to blocker list since 51567 was resolved as a dup.  cc dougt, since
he seems to know a lot about fixing these, and DanM is on vacation until 9/13.

Comment 3

[John Morrison]

*** Bug 51790 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[selmer (gone)]

Going to AKA pops up a password dialog from PSM that also results in this little
window.

Comment 5

[Michael La Guardia]

PDT agrees P1

Comment 6

[Joseph Elwell]

This is also blocking nsbeta3+ bug in IM. http://bugscape/show_bug.cgi?id=2205

Comment 7

[Stephen P. Morse]

*** Bug 52540 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Peter Trudelle]

*** Bug 51976 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

adding mostfreq keyword to put this on  'high visibility' radar
Btw, is anyone seeing thison linux.  I think I've experienced some of the same 
crashes (dismissing image and cookie warning dialogs) without actually seeing 
the little window. see bug 52736

Comment 10

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

dan, please attach the patch.

Comment 11

[Dan M]

  Fix is checked in. The problem was that alerts and dialogs which still 
(erroneously) use HiddenWindow for their parent were activating HiddenWindow when 
they were closed. They were only doing that on Windows OS, however -- it was a 
workaround for an OS bug. (See bugzilla bug 22658). So I've disabled that 
function if the parent window was HiddenWindow.
  I imagine that was the cause of all these related bugs about the dangerous 
little window. The timing of these bugs' appearance was right, and I know this 
patch fixes at least one of them. However, this affects only Windows builds, so 
Asa's Linux bug mentioned above is definitely unaffected by this patch.

Comment 12

[Michael La Guardia]

We would hold PR3 for this if it was not fixed

Comment 13

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 51049 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[John Morrison]

verified fixed. Can't get any of the paths to produce the strange little window
(PSM dialog, repost form data, remove all cookies, ...).