It just fixed itself.... but no one but me needs to know that fact!

A few days ago, I was running Suzi like usual... I had just started watching an anime video in KPlayer, full screen, when I realized that I had seen the video before. Being lazy like I am, I hit Alt + F4, which is supposed to stop the video, close the video file, and close KPlayer, returing me to the KDE desktop and to the most recent window or application that I was using... Well, for some reason when I do this every now and then, it'll crash KWIN (the portion of KDE that manages the windows and K-bar). With KWIN crashed, there's almost nothing accessible in KDE. The front most window is stuck there, the file menu is usually still there, and the front most windows can be closed, allowing data to be saved (if luck is on one's side...). Sometimes the File menu isn't there, and there's nothing to be done about that, accept try to work around without being able to close that window (and it being permanently stuck in the foreground).

This time, I was able to close several windows, accept one of the konqueror windows (which mysteriously lost it's file menu). An odd thing that I noticed when I was preparing to log out of my session, was that the Gnome desktop manager (Nautilus, I believe is it's name, although that may only be the name of the file browser) was actually managing my desktop -- which looked pretty damn odd. I couldn't click on anything, but my icons and the way the desktop looked was in an obvious gnome look. After a bit of pondering, I decided to keep going with this "emergency shutdown process" -- I was mostly worried about the applications that I wasn't able to shutdown... I keep several apps in the KDE system tray (Gaim, Amarok, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Mozilla Sunbird) -- each of these apps can have a bad experience if they are left running when I log out of the system, especially the Mozilla applications, they can easily get a file-lock on the profile, which can take some work to undo (finding the lock file can be quite the pain at times).

Since there wasn't anyway for me to access these applications, aside from going to a tty session and killing them by hand (which would have had the same affect of doing a log-out without shutting them down) I decided to just go ahead and log out and hope for the best. When I returned to KDE, things were looking good: the desktop icons were in the correct spots (a tell-tale sign of KDE/SUSE problems is when the desktop icons shuffle themselves into the upper left corner of the screen), and amarok, gaim, thunderbird, and sunbird all started without a hitch! Yeah! The deities of Linux were with me that day!

But after awhile of using the OS, I noticed something... Amarok has an OSD that displays the name of the song it just started playing for five seconds, and then disappears. It was now displaying the name of the song before it started playing it... It was quite odd. And then I noticed something else... The songs weren't changing, they were transitioning via a fade! Amarok has never done any fading that I've noticed before! And to top matters off, the spectrum analyzer (the bar things at the bottom of the amarok window -- also in XMMS and WinAmp and others) which has never worked for me suddenly started working. w00t! I'm soo happy, but I find it odd that it just started working out of the blue!