Bug 12666

I have recently updated by gentoo-sources to kernel version 2.6.22-r8 (from 2.6.22-r5) and also rebuilt the kernel, xorg-server (now version 1.3.0, released 19 April 2007) and all the correlated packages

==Previous bugs==
Some possibly unrelated bugs regarding the ps2 mouse (synaptics touchpad) and the keyboard have been fixed, they where somewhat related to i8042 multiplexing; just for your information, you can ask more if you think it's related. Sometimes some key events do get processed with delay - and that's very similar to the bug of atkbd.c messages in dmesg that I had before - however keyboard works almost flawlessly (couldnt test it very well in X since I have very little time before XFCE4 hangs).

==The bug==
But now, when I start XFCE4, the system hangs almost instantly if I open up two windows and switch 2-3 times to them using the taskbar buttons (top bar).
The triggering event seems to be the tooltip of buttons. When the tooltip pops up, I can still click once on a taskbar button. At that point, the relative window does not pop up and if I try to switch to it using Alt+Tab or if I click once more on a button of the taskbar, X hangs and no more processes my input.

Animations keep playing, and the bottom bar watch ":" keeps blinking (havent checked if the time elapses, btw).

From that moment, the mouse cursor can be moved around but no click events or keyboard events are caught by X. Progress bars animations still progress, but windows full redrawing never happens (windows do not close themselves after something finishes, for example sending an email). So the system seems on its own, not caring about my input.

I can only switch to a shell terminal and terminate the startx process on the relative terminal using Ctrl+C

The first times I have more chances to be able to switch back to the shell, because if I run again startx and then go back to the shell as explained above, at some point I will no more be able to use Ctrl+Alt+Fn and I will just have to hardly turn off the notebook.

The attachments are relative to the above described situation.

==Summary==
I have just 3-4 chances to be able to use X, and I must be careful at not opening more than 2 windows and not clicking on the taskbar relative buttons, then the system hangs and I will have to shut it down because I cant ever get back to the shell.

I have noticed that if I use /dev/input/mouse0 (legacy mouse) it hardly hangs; instead if I use as InputDevice /dev/input/mice (synaptics-mapped but with "mouse" driver) or the specific synaptics device (with "synaptics" driver), it hangs as explained previously.

==Bug isolation==
Please tell me how to reduce this nasty situation to a clearly identifiable bug.