Xfwm is set to focus-follows-mouse and click-to-raise. When clicking on the frame of a window, the clicked window will raise, but a window-geometry chicklet is displayed in the middle of the window, the mouse remains in the horizontal arrow icon and no keystrokes are sent to the window; very often, any mouse motion in this state will resize the window, even though the mouse button was not held down, it was only clicked. Sometimes I do get the desired behaviour and the focus is set to the frame-clicked window, but most often I have to click /inside/ the window to set the focus. It also appears to be particularly bad with gnome-terminal and nearly always happens with the new GNU Emacs GTK-ui support; the bug also happen with Firefox and with the Xfce utilities like the XFTerminal or XFfm but it almost never happens clicking to focus on efax-gtk. The bug does not appear to be load related. This is xfwm4 version 4.2.1 for Xfce 4.2.1 built with GTK+-2.6.4, linked with GTK+-2.6.4. running on a 700MHz Dell Dimension with Mandrake Linux 10.2 Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. xfwm set to click-to-raise and focus-follows-mouse 2. click the side or bottom frame of GNU Emacs/GTK or gnome-terminal Actual Results: mouse remains in resize-mode, window geometry appears in the chicklet, keystrokes are discarded; keystrokes _may_ sometimes go to the application which previously had the focus, but this is very rare and cannot be reproduced on demand. Expected Results: selected window should raise and gain desktop focus. Subsequent keystrokes should be passed to the managed application.
Yes, it's a known problem. What is unknown is why.
Should be fixed in SVN.