Gnome Terminal freezes when launched from Desktop Menu but works fine when launched from Panel Launcher or from the Panel Desktop Menu Plugin. LinNeighborhood has a similar problem where it cannot mount when launched from the Desktop Menu but works perfectly when launched from a Panel Launcher or from the Panel Desktop Menu Plugin. This only affects the CVS version of XFDesktop. Ver 4.0.5 works fine.
Additional information: I believe that the problem deals with the way the desktop menu launches to program as a fork or as a thread since LinNeighborhood reports the error message: "waitpid failed: Error was No child processes"
this is known. unfortunately, the cause is rather unknown, and a fix is probably going to involve a bit of a rewrite, which i'm in the middle of now.
by the way... could you clarify what you mean in what you think the problem is? i'm not sure that you're on the right track, but i'm not so far in the rewrite that i wouldn't abandon it if someone were to come up with a fix...
Since the LinNeighborhood error is saying that the waitpid failed, I'm assuming it has something to do with how the process is being executed. Since this isn't a problem in 4.0.5, could it be something added to the code since then? Where in the code does the desktop menu run the programs? If I can see how it's executing the chosen program, it would probably make it easier for me to figure out what I was trying to say. ;)
ah, i see... i doubt it's a problem with how it's being launched, though the 'waitpid failed' is interesting (i've never seen that one before). if you're interested in how apps are launched, take a look at xfce_exec() in xfce4/libxfcegui4/xfce-exec.c. basically, it boils down to using g_spawn_async_with_pipes() (from glib).
Also, I don't know if you noticed this, but the gnome-terminal problem only occurs if there is not an already running gnome-terminal process. If I run gnome-terminal from the panel, leave it open, then open gnome-terminal from the desktop menu, it works fine.
yeah, that's known. more generally (at least with gtk 2.4 and gnome-2.6-era apps), if gconfd is already running, it loads fine.
this should be fixed now in CVS. fix went in yesterday, and from what i've heard, it seems to be ok now. please reopen if there are still problems.