[SOLVED] XFCE 4 mouse stops working, hot plugging brings it

Question

I've been running XFCE4 for about 3 months now on this laptop without problem. About 3 weeks ago the mouse suddenly stopped working. Being USB I tried hot plugging it and that fixed it. But the issue kept happening with more frequency. I'm on a laptop that is in a docking station at work. I moved the mouse from the docking station port to the laptop port to make it easier to hot plug. About a week ago it locked and would not return on a hot plug. I tried plugging into the docking station and that fixed it. But, it happened again and moving between the laptop or docking station usb ports made no difference. I had to drop out of XFCE to fix it.
Switching to console one I did start noticing some thunar-volman error indicating "thunar-volman unsupported usb input device type." I followed some instructions about --ck-launch and this is my line in .xinitrc:
exec startxfce4 --with-ck-launch
I see a lot of issues with USB storage devices but I've yet to find anything about mouse or input issues in my searches (of course now that I make this post I am sure there will be lots readily avaiable). Since I am in a docking station and the laptop is closed I don't believe this has had an impact on the touchpad.
When not in a docking station I typically use Fluxbox. I do not see an issue in Fluxbox so I suspect that it must have something to do with XFCE4.
I'm soliciting any thoughts at what else I can be looking at to fix this problem.
Note, I have a co-worker who is using Fedora and Gnome 3. He's been experiencing similar problems, and those started about 2 weeks before mine. I do keep my system up to date checking for upgrades at least once a week.
Last edited by danns (2012-10-08 14:32:25)

Answer 1

It seems what is in the Thunar wiki is at odds with what is in the Xfce4 wiki with regards to starting Xfce4 from .xinitrc:
thunar wiki wrote:exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch <your wm>
xfce4 wiki wrote:exec startxfce4 --with-ck-launch
To be fair the Thunar wiki does say to see the entry for your WM/DE.
According to the Xfce4 wiki dbus-launch is now handled by the inclusion of the xinitrc.d code if you copy the default /etc/skel/.xinitrc file to begin with.
I switched over to using fluxbox this morning to see if the problem would occur. I managed to get through until 2 P.M. until the problem occurred. I thought I saw some hesitancy prior a bit throughout the morning as if the mouse was not registering the move because of the surface it was on but it did not stop.
When the mouse stopped functioning there was nothing I could see in the logs and, since I was not running Thunar or XFCE4, there was no Thunar message on console one. When the problem did start it seemed to happen three times within a few minutes too.
I guess it is something I will have to keep digging into. Maybe I will try a new mouse.
To answer your question:
thunar 1.4.0-2
thunar-archive-plugin 0.3.0-2
thunar-media-tags-plugin 0.2.0-2
thunar-volman 0.8.0-1
Interestingly I just had it happen again and when I switched over to Console One I saw this:
QDBusConnection: Session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
But this message does not come up each time the mouse is lost, so I am not sure it is related. Furthermore, just the act of switching to the console and back revived the mouse.
Thanks for you help, it is appreciated.