I have just recovered from this! You don't have to kill off your session. I used a terminal window that had focus on that desktop and killed the only gnome-screensaver I saw running; then ran a new gnome-screensaver. Then I went out for coffee. When I got back I had forgotten what I was doing and absentmindedly moved the mouse to make the screen saver go away and then I noticed that the desktop was responding to mouse button events again. The top and bottom panels still did not un-hide so I right clicked on the little edge that shows and unchecked auto-hide which made the top panel pop out. I then re-checked the auto-hide button and now both the top and bottom panels are working properly even though I didn't mess with the bottom one.
If you aren't lucky enough to have focus in a terminal window you could try to <CTRL><ALT><F2> to a text console and "killall gnome-screensaver" and "gnome-screensaver --display :1" to see if that helps. [Assuming you are on a single user workstation and your malfunctioning desktop is the first one logged in.] This is another demonstration of why coffee (or tea) is so important when working with computers. -- mouse issue screensaver + rdesktop https://launchpad.net/bugs/70075 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
