Ok, I solved the problem in my case. Given it seemed to be a communication problem I go the idea it could be ownership of sockets. I found various folders in my home directory were not owned by my local user and/or were not readable. Root owned .dbus and .gvfs, below .local were files/folders owned by me but without read/write permission.
I did a "chmod u+rw -R ~.local" and "sudo chown -R [myuser]:[myusergroup] /home/[myuser]" and a reboot and so far no problems since a few hours. Maybe it would be a good idea to check for that once in a while. There may be valid reasons of not-user-owned folders or files, but probably a warning message would help. Also I believe everything below .local should be read-writeable for the user and owned by it. Please correct me if I am wrong. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to mutter in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1181666 Title: gnome-shell randomly blocks mouse clicks from working in app windows Status in GNOME Shell: Confirmed Status in Ubuntu GNOME: Confirmed Status in gnome-shell package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in mutter package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Under GNOME 3, the use of the mouse-click stops occasionally, though I can still move the mouse around and can still click on items in the Activities screen and the top-bar. I can use alt-tab to cycle windows and can still type into already- active textboxes in windows, but I cannot click within the windows, and the mouse is not picked up at all by the windows. I can open the alt-f2 "run command" dialogue, but cannot type into it. The workaround I'm using is to open terminal (ctrl-alt-T) and run "gnome-shell -r", and restarting that command every time I have the problem again. Please ask if there's anything I forgot to mention. ADDITIONAL: The error tends to happen randomly, but it seems to happen upon opening a new window, changing windows, closing windows, or opening the activities pane (whether a change of window is thus instigated or not) ADDITIONAL 2: (sorry, it's early) The other workaround is to log out and to log in again, but that is also less than ideal ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04 Package: gnome-shell 3.6.3.1-0ubuntu6 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.8.0-22.33-generic 3.8.11 Uname: Linux 3.8.0-22-generic x86_64 ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8 Architecture: amd64 Date: Sun May 19 07:02:18 2013 DisplayManager: gdm GsettingsChanges: b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'clock-show-date' b'true' b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'clock-show-seconds' b'true' b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'document-font-name' b"'Sans 10'" b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'font-name' b"'Cantarell 10'" b'org.gnome.desktop.interface' b'monospace-font-name' b"'Ubuntu Mono 12'" InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-05-04 (14 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424) MarkForUpload: True ProcEnviron: LANGUAGE=en_GB:en PATH=(custom, no user) XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set> LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash SourcePackage: gnome-shell UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-shell/+bug/1181666/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp