Unrelieved black popups and message boxes

[Temlakos]

On 02/20/2013 10:04 AM, fred smith wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 09:39:58AM -0500, Temlakos wrote:
>> Everyone:
>>
>> I asked this before under a different heading, and no one answered.
>>
>> I get a large volume of e-mail, and very often I interact with a site
>> that brings up a lot of message boxes, "suggestion boxes" (for
>> auto-filling from a few keystroke clues), and bringing up apps after
>> they were minimized to the system tray or the task bar. Now why is it
>> that, after maybe two hours of operation, those popups come up and are
>> totally black? The only way to solve the problem, that I have found, is
>> to shut down. And even then, I can't even see what I'm doing, but have
>> to guess where the icons are for executing a controlled shutdown. (I can
>> always bring up a command-line login screen, log in as root, and then
>> shut down. But that doesn't seem to solve the problem for the next session.)
>>
>> And when I log back on, everything's fine--until it starts happening
>> again, after several more window draws.
>>
>> What could be causing this? Where do I even look for error logs and the
>> like?
> I have no clue as to the cause, but doing a shutdown may be
> unnecessarily heavy-handed.
>
> Sounds like some kind of X or Gnome or related toolkit problem.
> You could try CTRL-ALT-BKSP, which should kill X, effectively
> logging you off, then log in again and see if things are again
> working.
>
> if that works there are probably other things to try killing to
> see which one is causing the problem. One other idea would be to switch
> to a text console, to "ps -u <your username>" to find out all the processes
> you own then kill 'em all -- except for the text terminal you're using.
>
> I haven't googled for "gnome troubleshooting", but you might find
> something helpful if you did.
>
> good luck!
>
> Fred
>

I don't use Gnome. I use KDE. Do you suggest this is a KDE issue, and 
not an F18 or screen display driver issue?

Temlakos