The Plasma Disease

[Timothy Murphy]

I see this has struck me again, after a couple of weeks.
Is it generally familiar?
The main symptom, or at least the one that causes most trouble,
is that the desktop panel no longer responds to mouse clicks.

I should say at this point that I am running Fedora-20/KDE
on a Thinkpad T61;
so there is a "TrackPoint" button instead of a mouse.

One consequence of the lack of response is that
it is no longer possible to Restart, or even Logout,
by clicking on the K-button.
Fortunately, it is still possible to change virtual desktop by Ctl-F<n>;
so I can go to a console window, and say "shutdown -h now".
(I usually shutdown rather than re-starting,
as this is more likely - but by no means certain - to cure the symptom.)
I'm sure this can't be healthy, as the shutdown is ten times faster
than the "proper" way, through the K-button.

Another symptom is that a small window open up every few seconds 
at the pointer, with Paste, Copy, etc written in it;
and one cannot continue until this window closes after 10 seconds or so.

A third symptom is that rectangular tracts of the screen turn black, 
briefly.

A fourth symptom is that even in a konsole screen like this
it is no longer possible to copy and paste.

One curious feature of the disease is that it usually cures itself
after 15 minutes or so.
(No, it hasn't done so in the present case.)

I'm wondering if this is a disease specific to Thinkpads -
maybe something to do with the Synaptics driver -
or if it is a general KDE affliction?

I've asked about this before, and various remedies have been suggested,
which I have religiously followed,
but none of them have cured the affliction.

If anyone knows the answer, or even the cause of the disease,
I should be very grateful to be told.

(I had a cup of coffee, and it is cured - for now.)

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland