evolution autocompletion locks up X

[jle]

Has anyone had a problem with autocompletion in evolution (2.0.2 and up) locking up X to where you can type anything or use the mouse buttons (cursor still moves)? The only way I can get out of this is to ssh into the machine and kill evolution, after which I can continue to work. If I don't have access to another machine, I have to power cycle the machine.

I probably should leave well enough alone, but I emerge world about once a month or so. I had been running fine for the past year. Sometime in February, evolution started locking up on me. I can move the mouse but keyboard clicks and mouse clocks have no effect, except that I can use alt and arrow keys to move to a different workspace. It only happens when evolution is doing an autocomplete on the email address that I am typing in the To: field. I've tried all versions 2.0.2 and up to 2.0.4. I had 2.0.2 installed before I emerged world in mid February, which updated a lot of packages. Before than I had no problems. Also, in January, emerge world automatically updated me to Xorg. Since I believe that things worked ok with 2.0.2 and before the world emerge in mid February, but now 2.0.2 still locks up, my conclusion is that there is something else that is also partly to blame for the evolution lockup.

I could try to go back to earlier version of various packages, which ones I don't know - maybe going back to XFree86, previous versions of gnome, etc. The problem is that there are a lot of packages, and I may never hit the right combinations to isolate the problem. I'm not even sure how to get back to where I was at the beginning of January. I backup up my data, but I don't typically backup all my system files (I'll probably start doing that....)

Oh, and here is another thing. If I turn off autocompletion in the preferences, everything works fine, but it still autocompletes! I would have thought that if I turn off the autocomplete, it wouldn't even bringup up any completion choices. THe annoying thing now is that when I start up evolution after turning on the laptop, autocomplete is turned on again. How do I turn the autocompletion off so that the next time evolution starts up autocompletion is not on?

Also, and this may be better for another thread in a different forum, but since mid-February, I've been getting total lockup with blank screen just after booting and before the nvidia splash screen comes up (did I mention I was using nvidia?). When I look at /var/log/messages, the messages stops with

[jle]

Well, I guess no one else has had this problem, but in case anyone does, here is a workaround for me. I found that alt-tab still works. When I cycle through the windows, it will come back to the message compose window and the focus is back and everything works fine from that point on - until you hang up the next time evolution tries to do an autocomplete. So, what is happening is that the focus has gone somewhere and moving my mouse, mous clicks, or key presses do not bring back the focus, except for the alt-tab keys. Anyway, hope this helps the next person that sees the same problem.

After having emerged/unmerged countless number of things, I think I finally have figured out that it has something to do with the combination of sawfish and evolution. There is something else affecting this since sawfish version hasn't changed in a long while and everything was working fine until mid February when I did an emerge world. When I tried another window manager (fvwm), it didn't hang (let's not get into a debate about which window manager is the best).

Since I have no other answers, I guess I'll either live with this workaround, or if I'm desparately looking to avoid doing real work, I'll reinstall from scratch when I have a couple of days to kill to see if that gets rid of the problem altogether.

John