Unresponsive plasma panel

[Roderick Johnstone]

Hi

Sorry, rather a long complicated email but I need some help debugging a
plasma panel issue, please.

Sometimes the panel on my desktop kde session gets into a state where,
upon login, its not quite maximized widthwise, has a flashing white
block at the right hand end and is very unresponsive. At this point,
plasma-desktop and kwin are taking 20% cpu each and X is taking 60%.

The way I fix this (temporarily) is to kill plasma-desktop and remove
.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc and restart plasma-desktop.

This is happening with kde 4.5.5 on Fedora 14 x86_64. Normally I use a
customised system plasma-desktop-appletsrc which adds a few launcher
buttons and a clock, but the same thing happens without my customization.

I think the problem is related to running a kde nx session from my
laptop. When that session terminates it seems to rewrite
.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc and its that file that causes
a problem next time I log in on the desktop. That session runs at 1274x734
which is just a bit smaller in the X-dimension than the 1280x1024 screen
that the the plasma panel occupies on my desktop (actually that is a
dual screen setup but, of course, the panel only occupies once screen.
There is plausibly an 8-pixel gap between the end of the plasma panel
and the edge of the screen.

I'd really like to try to pin down whats going on, but for a start, the
format of the plasma-desktop-appletsrc is not obvious. Is that
documented anywhere? If I could understand that file, maybe I could see
whats causing the problem.

Oh, and I just determined it doesnt happen if I switch off desktop effects.

Thanks for an pointers or help anyone might be able to offer in sorting
this out.

This is, I think, essentially the same problem that my colleague
reported at: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258662

Roderick