Right clicking causes WindowServer hang

Question

Hi there,
I'm running an nVidia GTX 285 and a GT 120 in my 2008 Mac Pro, with 32GB RAM and a RAID 0 setup.
Lately, on my third screen solely powered by the GT 120, right-clicking has caused a brief flash of white (usually a square the same size as the contextual menu that appears) and then everything freezes. My music still plays, the system logs events, I can SSH in etc.
After about 1 or 3 minutes of waiting I'm forced to pull the plug.
There's no way I'm able to reliably reproduce the issues as sometimes it will go quite a while before having the problem again.
So far any form of right clicking on my other two displays powered by the GTX 285 have not caused a crash.
I recently restored my Mac Pro from a cloned backup - however the backup was a little corrupt, as many files (typically my home folder and files I had created in the root of my Hard Drive) no longer had the correct permissions for me to access them. This also applied to applications I had installed myself via drag 'n drop instead of using a package installer.
After sorting out all of the permissions I could, Disk Utility reports a bunch of errors, but they come up every time and are on the Apple 'safe to ignore' list.
The logs I see in the Console app around the time of the hangs are:
NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error
kernel[0]: NVDA(Display): Channel timeout!
kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel timeout!
fseventsd[55]: client: 0x809a00 : USER DROPPED EVENTS!
Any thoughts?
Cheers,

Answer 1

sigh
There are known issues with the Nvidia drivers and the GTX 285 with precisely those errors.
Since you seem like a fairly knowledgeable user, you may want to consider filing an official bug report with Apple about this at http://bugreport.apple.com/ (an Apple Developer Connection (ADC) membership is required; you can get the free "ADC Online Membershiop" available here: http://developer.apple.com/products/membership.html). I recently did for a version of OS X I'm not allowed to talk about. .
There's a thread in the eVGA forums about a similar issue (this one happens to be triggered by The Sims 3 game), which results in a similar channel exception error: http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=100801338
If you have any 3D games, you might try seeing if you can trigger the issue with those. For me, Call of Duty 2 triggers the exception (all other versions of COD are fine). If I spent more time in Leopard these days, I would file a bug report myself if I were able to trigger one.
Just a note, if you ssh in, you should be able to reboot your system by issuing a "sudo reboot" at the command line. I've been able to do that with my machine though I do need to wait about 3 or 3 and a half minutes before it manages to restart. I figure a restart is always better than a forced shutdown.