[Bug 287002] panel freezes

[MountainX]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=287002

--- Comment #106 from MountainX <davestechshop at gmail.com> ---
@Lamarque - thank you. And I apologize again for this slightly off topic
discussion, but I haven't found anywhere else to discuss it that is even
remotely related to the issue I saw. This is the closest bug  I found so far
(and I also apologize for not being able to provide more specific details). My
posts on various forums got me nowhere.

What I saw specifically was that Dolphin and the entire KDE menu system and
desktop would become unresponsive. The freeze lasted much more than a minute.
Once I waited about 15 minutes for it to recover and it did not. (I think I may
have waited over an hour once also.) At first I could find no way to recover
other than a hard reset (because I didn't have the key sequennce for killing
the X server enabled at that point). Another time, a terminal window was
already open. I was able to put focus on the terminal window and issue a reboot
command and that worked. Another time when a terminal window was not already
open, I could find no way to get one to open. None fo the shortcuts or menus
would allow me to open any applications.

Interestingly, as the above comment makes clear, if certain application windows
were open, I could interact with those. But I could not interact with the
desktop or system menus at all. No shortcut keys worked, no plasmoids would
respond, the launcher would not respond, Dolphin was completely frozen, etc.
But, if I recall correctly, not only was a terminal still responsive, I think
Firefox was still responsive too. A text editor was partially functional too.
But I could not save any files and I lost all my work in progress in all open
windows. 

The mere possibility of a random/unpredictable and unresolvable lockup like
this happening is (from my perspective) serious enough that I felt a discussion
about my experiences was warranted (even though I recognize I'm not properly
reporting a bug).

Again, this happened more than once. And I do have to reiterate that I haven't
had this kind of desktop lockup since I stopped using WIndows around 6 years
ago. (It was a new OpenSuse 12.1 install on new hardware selected specifically
for Linux compatibility.) I once had a box without a swap file and I ran out of
available memory a few times. Even then I managed to get into a console and
kill a few processes (e.g., Firefox) and then get back into gnome and recover.
I'm used to Linux being very robust. This KDE freezing experience is a
startling exception.

And, btw, this machine is a Xeon CPU with ECC RAM. I do not think faulty
hardware is responsible. And I haven't seen any more freezes since I
temporarily went back to a distro with KDE 4.7.x.

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