Weird GNOME behaviour (in Dapper and Edgy)

[Severin Schoepke]

Hi list!

I decided to switch from Windows with the Dapper release. I installed it 
and all went well. But because it was my first Linux installation that I 
used for daily work, I messed around and tried lots of stuff, which 
maybe introduced damage... When Edgy was released, I reformatted the HD 
and did a clean install of Edgy. I tried to keep this installation clean 
(only using official repos, no EasyUbuntu, no Automatix and so on).

But I have a weird problem with both installations: Sometimes Gnome 
doesn't allow the creation of new windows: When I'm working and want to 
start a new app or open a folder, it happens from time to time that the 
app/folder is not started/opened. There's a new entry in the task bar in 
the likes of 'Mozilla Firefox wird gestartet...' (FF is being started in 
english) that just disappears after a few seconds. I then can't start 
applications, be it via the start menu, a panel launcher, a starter on 
the desktop or from a terminal that is already open... Then suddenly, 
after 10 minutes or so, the apps finally start/the windows get opened...

This is really annoying, and a fix for it is to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and 
restart X... And I find it strange that noone else reported this 
problem, I can't believe I'm the only one suffering from this...

As I said it happenend on both installations (the probably messed up 
Dapper and the clean Edgy)... I use a Dell Inspirion laptop with 512 
megs RAM and with a GeForce FX5200. The binary drivers (nvidia-glx) from 
the official repo are installed. Most of the time I have quite a few 
apps running (Thunderbird, Gaim, Rythmbox, Tomboy and a Terminal). And I 
usually don't shut down the computer but use hibernation instead...

I have no idea where the problem lies: I suspect it could be a X 
problem, or a window manager problem or maybe a memory problem. But 
normally everything is working (X and the window manager make no 
problems other than that) and 512 megs of RAM is not much, but it should 
be enough and the RAM is fine (I memtested it)...

Does anyone have an idea where the problem lies or how to fix it?

TIA!

cheers, Severin