This problem occured just recently in XFCE4.2 RC3. Before upgrading from RC2 I had been using torsmo (a small system monitoring program) just fine, but now it flickers - it stays on the screen for a few seconds and then disappears for a few seconds, then appears again. It it very similar to the behaviour torsmo shows in kde. There is a way to correct the flickering problem : if I start torsmo with the -o option (from torsmo manual "-o Create own window to draw"), it doesn't flicker anymore, but it is still somewhat annoying as it now tends to stay on top of other windows. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
sorry, but you're not giving me enough information. does it flicker on its own, or does it flicker when windows are dragged across it? if it's the former, that's almost certainly a bug in torsmo. xfdesktop doesn't use double buffering for drawing the backdrop, which may contribute to the problem, though that hasn't changed in a long time. i *did* change how the desktop is drawn between rc2 and rc3, which may be the problem, but the change was required for other reasons, so it's not going back.
It is flashing on its own regardless of other windows or their movement. When I start xfce it is the only application that I have set to start automatically and it starts flashing on and off already then. In torsmo readme this is said: KNOWN PROBLEMS Drawing to root or some other desktop window directly doesn't work with all window managers. Especially doesn't work well with Gnome and it has been reported that it doesn't work with KDE either. Nautilus can be disabled from drawing to desktop with program gconf-editor. Uncheck show_desktop in /apps/nautilus/preferences/. There is -w switch in torsmo to set some specific window id. You might find xwininfo -tree useful to find the window to draw to. You can also use -o argument which makes torsmo to create its own window. So I guess it is a torsmo issue (either a bug or a feature). You say the change in the way the desktop is drawn is intentional, so guess i'll be switching back to gkrellm
yep, this is a torsmo's problem. i'd suggest looking into the -w switch, if you explicitly pass it xfdesktop's window id, it may work better (?). you can get the window id the same way i do it here: http://spuriousinterrupt.org/projects/xfce4/root-tail-xfdesktop.txt