489757 - thunderbird decides I've released the mouse button when I haven't, then decides I've pressed it again when I haven't - drag and drop fails

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Kamens]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090327 Fedora/3.1-0.11.beta3.fc11 Firefox/3.1b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20090105 Fedora/2.0.0.19-1.fc10 Thunderbird/2.0.0.19 Mnenhy/0.7.5.666

I move email messages between folders a lot in thunderbird.

Frequently, when I left-click on a message and try to drag it into a folder in the folder list, part-way through the drag, thunderbird will decide that I've let go of the mouse button and the move will fail.

Sometimes, something even worse happens -- thunderbird will somehow deselect the message I was dragging and select the folder the mouse is currently over, such that when I subsequently let go of the mouse button, what ends up getting dragged into the destination folder is not the message I was originally trying to move, but rather some random other folder!  This can be *very* annoying when that folder contains many messages and takes a long time to move, as you might imagine.  It appears that for some reason thunderbird is deciding that I've released the mouse button and immediately clicked it again.

I can't reproduce this inside any other application.  I've tried a lot of moving around my mouse and clicking and releasing in xev, and I can't see any evidence that there are actually X events telling thunderbird that I've released the mouse button when I haven't recently.

I've even tried replacing my mouse, and it didn't help.  Not only that, but the old mouse was a PS/2 mouse and the new one is a USB wireless mouse, so pretty much everything is different, and yet the problem persists.

I know at first glance this sounds like a problem with my hardware, but I just can't see any evidence of that.  On the other hand, it's odd that no one else has reported this problem as far as I can tell.  I'm hoping that someone else will chime in that they've seen it too.

This has been happening to me for quite a while, going back to before I switched from thunderbird 2 to thunderbird 3.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
Click a message and try to drag it into a folder.
Actual Results:  
Message doesn't get moved into other folder.  Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes a folder gets moved instead (grr!).

Expected Results:  
Message is moved into the folder I was trying to move it into.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I did not find a toolkit nor a core bug to go with this.  Interesting that this is being reported for v2.

On trunk I've seen drag losing the message (rarely) on windows, but never quite able to repro/nail the behavior. iirc (unless I am thinking of a much older problem) one odd aspect is after it happens the first time, I am sometimes not able to pick up/drag a message at all for a while. just get the circle with line through it.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

OK. recollection is coming back. either this or some older bug was related to the mouse drag being interrupted by some other event.  like the reverse of bug 368214

Comment 3

[Jay Moran (jaym/lazvon)]

I could not get this to reproduce on: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090422 Shredder/3.0b3pre

Running on an Intel Mac Book Pro 2.6Ghz, Mac OSX 10.5.6, Wireless Mighty Mouse.

Here were the three tests I used in an attempt to reproduce:

1) Click and drag message around for 15 seconds or so. Never "let go". Repeated this in various incantations about 10 times.

2) Send message from web-based GMail to my corporate email. Flip back to Thunderbird. Click and drag message around until message arrives in inbox. Again, the mouse click never let go. Repeated this 3 times.

3) Had someone send me an Instant Message through AdiumX which plays a sound and does a dock icon bounce while I was clicking and holding a message in Thunderbird. Again, the mouse click never let go. Repeated this 2 times.

So, at least for me: WORKS FOR ME. Will await someone else's testing results.

Comment 4

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

I haven't seen this on trunk; the problems I've seen recently have been folder-to-folder drags, and have a different methodology.  If/when I see it again, I'll file a new bug.

Comment 5

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

I think this particular bug can't block until someone other than reporter is seeing it regularly and able to reproduce.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bug 474000 was one bug I was thinking of that's in this genre. but doesn't fit the symptoms, and is already fixed

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Bug 458570 -  Popup "toast" messages while dragging a message over a folder causes erratic behaviour

Bug 471128 -  Divider between message list and message body stops react to dragging command

Bug 249445 -  Dragging headers-only msg to remote IMAP folder loses ability to fetch message

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

see also bug bug 439333.

I'm marking this major 
what sometimes happens afterward is why I am marking this major - often one of two things happens:
1. drag and drop totally stops working, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes forever - this requiring restart
2. if drag and drop does work, I often see evidence of corrupted indexes (**) which require rebuilding index

**
Bug 480938 -  emails lost during drag n' drop from folder to another folder for IMAP
 Bug 469455 -  Dragging "deep" trees from one IMAP account to another does not copy everything -- specifically paragraph 1, item #3, of Bug 469455 comment 0 "At random times, I became completely impossible to move anything at all, and
I had to restart Thunderbird to continue moving stuff"

I have some confidence the drag failure is related to new messages coming in (and this includes messages moved by filters) - one can see them with Activity Manager when using trunk and beta build.  What I don't know yet is whether this is imap only.

query for finding related bugs: http://tinyurl.com/rygucq

ignore bug 471128. also doubt bug 249445 is related

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I did an extensive search in product=Core of drag and mouse bugs and didn't come up with anything useful to this bug.  

What's the next step, a debug build?  Or I could perhaps shoot this with visual studio


  Jonathan, are you imap or pop?  My guess is your unintended folder select is nothing more than the folder being selected on the explicit mouseup event when you actually release the button

Comment 10

[Jonathan Kamens]

OK, so judging by other comments, there might be a real issue here, but I have to confess that in my case, it appears to that it turns out that it was a hardware issue after all.

I'm a little surprised that two different mice had the same bouncing-button problem, but I finally managed to reproduce it in xev outside of thunderbird, and after opening up the mouse and messing around with its innards a bit, I've made the problem go away, at least for me.

So I guess unless someone else can verify the exact issue I described, the issue should be closed.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Jonathan, approximately what was your reproducible rate prior to fixing the HW - 10, 25, 50%?

Comment 12

[Jonathan Kamens]

When the problem was happening, it was happening frequently, anywhere from 20% to 50% of the time I tried to move a message.

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

closing this puppy invalid per reporter's findings of hardware malfunction. 

anyone who sees this without mouse HW problem will want visit bug 458570