Phantom boxes drawn with KDE 4.2 + 180.x driver

[tww1fa]

I'm seeing a problem with my installation - EVGA 8800GT card, driver 180.44 (although I've seen this with all the 180 series), Kubuntu 9.04, KDE 4.2.2 (but again, seen on earlier KDE 4.2.x releases.) Sometime when switching windows, a box border or part of a box border is drawn in the window. The box doesn't match up with the window borders or anything obvious on the screen. I can reproduce it pretty easily by overlapping two windows (for example a Konsole and a file manager window) and moving the mouse slowly between them (with focus-follows-mouse turned on.) The boxes show up and then disappear as the mouse moves. If I keep repeating, eventually I won't see the boxes any more. Sometimes if I'm running an app in Wine (like World of Warcraft) sometimes I'll see the same type of box appear apparently at random. Mplayer with vdpau has also shown these boxes.

I have composite turned on in KDE, with a lot of the effects (including wobbly windows) turned on. Turning off all effects seems to solve the problem.
Has anyone seen anything similar? Is there any configuration setting I need to give to improve the situation?

[mdoerner]

Yes, I have the same problem with 9600 GSO and Open SuSE11.1 KDE 4.2.2. It's a pretty minor issue, just switch desktops to force the refresh. If it gets worse I'll post a bug report like you did.

Mike Doerner

[tww1fa]

I've found that running Mythfrontend shows this very badly while going through the MythTV menus.

[tww1fa]

One more piece of information - if I turn off the Blur effect ("Blurs the background behind semi-transparent windows") this problem does not occur. So I have a workaround.

[clarious]

Originally Posted by tww1fa

I'm seeing a problem with my installation - EVGA 8800GT card, driver 180.44 (although I've seen this with all the 180 series), Kubuntu 9.04, KDE 4.2.2 (but again, seen on earlier KDE 4.2.x releases.) Sometime when switching windows, a box border or part of a box border is drawn in the window. The box doesn't match up with the window borders or anything obvious on the screen. I can reproduce it pretty easily by overlapping two windows (for example a Konsole and a file manager window) and moving the mouse slowly between them (with focus-follows-mouse turned on.) The boxes show up and then disappear as the mouse moves. If I keep repeating, eventually I won't see the boxes any more. Sometimes if I'm running an app in Wine (like World of Warcraft) sometimes I'll see the same type of box appear apparently at random. Mplayer with vdpau has also shown these boxes.

I have composite turned on in KDE, with a lot of the effects (including wobbly windows) turned on. Turning off all effects seems to solve the problem.
Has anyone seen anything similar? Is there any configuration setting I need to give to improve the situation?

I also had this problem when I was using KDE 4 too. It happened even if composite was turned off. Though I don't know exactly how to reproduce it, sometimes it happened after I had been using for 15 minutes, sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but do a lot of window/workspace switching will help. There was no memory leak though, everything looked fine with xrestop.