Drop down menus stop working every so often

Question

Every so often drop down menus stop working in applications. This has happened in thunderbird and firefox. A quick fix is to restart the application.

Answer 1

You are experiencing this bug probably:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/894048

You can follow along by marking "this affects me" on the bug and subscribing to it:

• How do I subscribe to a bug?

Answer 2

Do the reporters of the bug/problem use XIM input method(s)?

If so, you might want to check out the mozilla bugzilla entry

Using XIM with Firefox will cause firefox menu cannot popup correctly. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=787943

At least, one cause of the problem is traced to uninitialized timestamp in core X library.

Answer 3

I have found that in my case this happens when I have used a windows program in wine while firefox is open. If I minimize and then restore firefox functionality returns. There is no need to close firefox.

Further testings shows this happens with a wine encapsulated program that allows minimize to taskbar when window close (X) is clicked. It does not happen when the window minimize button is used (_).

It would appear that the problem is that the wine program is not returning control to the firefox window when minimzed using the close button until focus is regained by re-opening the firefox window.

If a different ubuntu window is selected firefox functions again when you return focus to it.

The bug seems to be in the windows program, not firefox or ubuntu.