File and application disappear off screen

[Rutilus]

An hour ago something new started happening. When I open a file using a link on the desktop, the file begins to open as normal then the file and the application disappear off screen. It looks as if it goes into a parallel desktop or something like that. How can I revert to the usual behaviour?

I've been using Linux Mint 11 since Autumn 2011 without issue until now. I've tried various search terms in a search engine and browsed this forum without getting an answer to the issue so I'm posting in this forum and hoping someone can help. I expect it's something simple. Thanks.

[viking777]

I expect it's something simple.

I expect it is. The answer is whatever you were playing around with just over an hour before it started happening.

The only time that computers carry out random changes is when they have components that are failing or when they have just been updated. At other times they just obey whatever command or tweak the user has given them. So if you can rule out the first two then the third is your answer, you just have to remember what it was you did to it.

[Rutilus]

While I don't know if my computer is failing and did recently make 43Mb of updates, I agree that it's possibly a tweak I did, because I changed many settings over the past few days. It would be hard to unravel them all. Instead here is some more information about the issue.

The file and application disappearing only happens when I open LibreOffice Calc files using links on the desktop or double click on the .ods file in my home folder, in either case when LibreOffice is closed. It doesn't happen if I open LibreOffice Calc first then open a .ods file from within LibreOffice; and it doesn't happen if I open LibreOffice first then open a .ods file using a link on the desktop or double click on a .ods file in my home folder. It doesn't happen for text files (Gedit), html files (Firefox), pdf files (Document Viewer) or jpeg files (Document Viewer or Gimp). None of the tweaks I did were to LibreOffice. I close applications after use so no other application is running.

If I first do a rogue action then a properly working action, I can tell from the opening speed that LibreOffice was already open, and when I look at the foot of the Window menu, the rogue file that disappeared off screen is listed, but if I click on its name, either nothing happens or the screen kind of slides to the side and I can see the rogue file. If I open the same file in both the rogue and working actions, the file's name appears twice, once accessibly and once either not or after the sliding phenomenon. If I close LibreOffice and open it again, the rogue file is still listed at the foot of the Window menu. If I restart the computer, a window flashes on the screen to tell me a process is still running and, although the restart proceeds before I can read the message, I can see that the message includes "LibreOffice" (although as far as I'm concerned LibreOffice is closed). Looking in System Monitor doesn't help me but maybe I don't know how to interpret what I see: most processes are described as "sleeping" and "LibreOffice" and "zeitgeist-datah" are described as "zombie" whichever way LibreOffice is opened.

I hoped someone could help me before I wrote an epic because when I start describing detail it's hard for me to stop and I get the notion that the detail may fog the issue. Let's hope not anyway.

Can anyone tell me what is happening here or suggest what I could try to do to change the rogue behaviour?

[viking777]

I don't use Libre Office so I probably can't help with this, but I go back to my original guess - was Libre Office one of the 43 Mb of updates that you did recently? (I think we can rule out hardware failure because it would affect more than one application).

You can always try the 'Classic' uninstall/reinstall method, it is a bit of an old 'chestnut', but it has been known to work. If LO was updated recently then it is probably more help to reinstall the previous version if you can find it.

Also have you searched through here to see if anything matches your problem:

http://www.mail-archive.com/libreoffice ... mail3.html