176600 - Ghost and dead compose window appear with VirtualWin desktop manager

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[James Rome]

After Mozilla is up for a while, the frame of a compose window appears. It is
totally unresponsive. The rest of Mozilla works just fine. However, to kill it,
I must kill Mozilla.

One unusual thing is that I am using the NVidia utility that makes multiple
desktops.

Comment 1

[James Rome]

This is still happening on the 11/19 build. It is definitely related to the
NVidia NView desktop utility. Switching away from and back to the mail/news
desktop always creates this ghost frame.

I found that I can get rid of it by starting to compose a letter which
instantiates the ghost and then it can be deleted!

This is very annoying!

Comment 2

[Greg]

This bug is similar to one I see in Mozilla 1.2 build 20021128 for Beos but the
difference here is that to make the ghost window appear I have to compose or
reply to a message and only after I click the send button does the blank window
appear. The window cannot be closed until I close Mozilla. As in the first case
the browser and MailNews is not affected otherwise.   

Comment 3

[James Rome]

No one seems to be looking at this bug.
For me, it is definitely related to the NVidia multi desktop manager. I switched
to VirtualWin and it went away. But it would be nicer to use video memory for
this rather than PC memory.

Comment 4

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

All we do on our side is to hide the compose window using the win32 API. There
is nothing much we can do (for now) if NVidia multi desktop manager has an hard
time dealing with that kind of windows! Have you reported the problem to NVidia?

Comment 5

[James Rome]

I will try to beat on NVidia. But why should the compose window be open at all?
Even hidden?
I was not in the process of composing a message.

Comment 6

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

For performance matter, we never close the compose window but we just hidde it.
What you are seeing is a previous compose window which has been cached. You can
turn of this feature by setting the following pref to 0 in your prefs.js file:

            pref("mail.compose.max_recycled_windows", 0); 

Comment 7

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

James Rome, is this bug still a problem for you?  If not, please mark it as
  Resolved | WorksForMe

Comment 8

[James Rome]

Yes it is a problem in the latest Thunderbird still. It is an interaction with VirtualWin (http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/). If I switch desktops and come back, I always get the hidden frame appearing. The only way to kill the frame is to compose something, and then close it.

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

similar to bug 176103 regarding desktop managers

Comment 10

[James Rome]

Using the beta on virtuaWin, and SeaMonkey, this seems to not be a problem any more.