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I'm running Debian Wheezy using gdm3 as window manager and xfce4 as desktop environment.

Every so often, when I login, the desktop environment starts OK, but all windows are missing the title bar and are positioned at location (0,0).

Usually logging out and back in, or restarting gdm3 and logging in, fixes it, but today it didn't. I switched to 'GNOME classic' which works fine, indicating it's probably a setting in xfce4 that's got corrupted.

Short of just zapping every file in .config/ and .cache/ which refers to xfce, is there a simple fix/edit?

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Sounds a bit like xfwm crashed and never got restarted. – jw013 Jul 25 '12 at 13:12
Is there a log file to indicate why it's crashing (or failing to start)? – StarNamer Jul 25 '12 at 22:41
That would probably depend on your set-up but ~/.xsession-errors might have something useful, or maybe the /var/log/Xorg.*log files. – jw013 Jul 25 '12 at 22:47
nothing obvious in ~/.xsession-errors' but simply restarting xfwm4` from a terminal seems to fix it (even across logouts/logins). – StarNamer Jul 26 '12 at 21:50

1 Answer

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Xfce's window manager crashed for some reason and the simple fix is to run xfwm4 in console.

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That was @jw013's answer (in a comment) but he never posted it as an answer, so, while correct, I cannot give you credit for it. – StarNamer Aug 19 '12 at 22:01
I'm sorry, AFAIK, the convention is to provide solutions as answers, not comments. – K3---rnc Aug 20 '12 at 8:58

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