Bug#767173: gnome-shell: Display freezes but mouse stays operational

[Michael Franzl]

Ok, I've found out more and now can reproduce the bug reliably every time.

How to reproduce this bug:

1. reboot computer
2. start Root Terminal
3. type `gedit` in this root terminal to start it (I guess any other 
program will do to, but I haven't tested it)
4. click on "Activities" OR move mouse into the upper left magic corner

The display freeze happens exactly at the time of clicking the mouse or 
arriving at the upper left corner.

Killing applications from another TTY will NOT remove their windows from 
TTY7.

/var/log/syslog will now be flooded with the following messages over and 
over (I have thousands of them in /var/log/syslog):

Oct 30 10:45:36 michael-debian gnome-session[1961]: (gnome-shell:2069): 
dconf-CRITICAL **: unable to create file '/run/user/1000/dconf/user': 
Permission denied.  dconf will not work properly.

Viewing `top` I saw that "gnome-settings-daemon" every time had a CPU 
load of 100%. CPU fan noise goes up due to high CPU load.

These bug reports seem to be related:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=956306

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=732209

Marcus, I also experienced the display freeze when right-clicking on the 
Desktop, but I could recover from these freezes by pressing Alt+F2 and 
exiting the popup window again. The bug I'm describing here is 
definitely NOT the issue you are mentioning, because with this type of 
freeze I'm reporting, Alt+F2 doesn't react, and also the keyboard is 
frozen. It should be a separate bug report.

Michael