[SOLVED] XFCE desktop stays over 50% CPU useage.

[zorlac]

My buddy plays Java & Flash based internet games.
Sometimes his poker game will throw up a window in FireFox that just WILL NOT go away so I setup an Xkill icon for him to nuke these annoying windows from time to time and it has worked very well for a year.
Well today he must have missed the window & nuked his desktop and since that time all he has is the top toolbar & a black desktop with no icons.
I tried these remedies via Team Viewer, since he's 25 miles away.
Updated via synaptic, no change.
Uninstalled & reinstalled Task-XFCE, no change.
I had him log out & log back in under my profile, no change.
I'm out of ideas.  
Thanks!

[JohnW_57]

Xkill is not the best option to kill an application and can give unexpected results.
I use always the task manager to kill a frozen application.
So it's better to use the xfce4 task manager for it.
Other option is to use Htop.

Info at: http://www.xfree86.org/current/xkill.1.html

Description

Xkill is a utility for forcing the X server to close connections to clients. This program is very dangerous, but is useful for aborting programs that have displayed undesired windows on a user's screen. If no resource identifier is given with -id, xkill will display a special cursor as a prompt for the user to select a window to be killed. If a pointer button is pressed over a non-root window, the server will close its connection to the client that created the window.

JohnW

[zorlac]

John,
I know xkill is dangerous and I told him to be very careful when using it but the gentleman is almost 75yrs old and not very computer literate so any operation in killing off tasks that isn't GUI based will be pretty much over his head.
Thanks for the help!
Mark

I just found out via Teamviewer that his xfdesktop is what is failing to start.

[zorlac]

Whoever just put an xfdesktop update into the repo is mine & Bill's HERO!
A just now synaptic update fixed it!!! 
Thanks!!

[JohnW_57]

Wineserver and the teamviewer daemon staying resistant in memory after closing the Teamviewer application.
Could be the cause the cpu staying at 50% (did check it).
After closing Teamviewer on my system both are at 0% cpu usage.

JohnW

[zorlac]

"Teamviewer application.
Could be the cause the cpu staying at 50%"

Nah, he had 100% CPU utilization when he called me on the phone at work with a black desktop 5 minutes after a reboot and NO apps running.
After he nuked his desktop I could see xfdesktop churning the cpu in task manager.

All better now (after the xfdesktop 4.10.2 update) except for the fact that he has to use Chromium instead of Fire Fox now since his old video card doesn't support the latest flash player and he keeps getting warnings to upgrade flash on various websites.
Chromium seems to be working for him for now.

[JohnW_57]

There was also a bug on xfdesktop 4.10.1.

Release notes for 4.10.2
========================
Xfdesktop 4.10.1 introduced a regression which triggered 100% CPU usage
when using a solid color as background. This is fixed with this new
release, sorry for the inconvenience.

JohnW