[gentoo-user] KDE VM Plasmashell corrupt

[Daniel D Jones]

I have Gentoo with KDE running in a Virtualbox VM.  It's a new install,
created and updated with the most recent packages less than a week ago.
 When I first start up the VM, the KDE desktop will not respond to the
mouse.  There's a rectangular box in the bottom right corner that's
shaded darker than the rest of the desktop.  It appears as though there
may be a dialog box there that is not properly displaying.  Neither
left or right clicking on the desktop, the menu app, the icons on the
desktop, etc. has any effect.  The system doesn't even seem to register
the clicks.  (I've also tried clicking on just about every pixel in the
shaded dialog-box area.)  However,if I put the cursor over the three
parallel lines in the upper left corner of the desktop, the icon
changes shade and shows the shadow.  It doesn't respond to clicks,
however.

I can press the Alt-F2 shortcut key and bring up the Run App dialog
box.  I can run Konsole from there.  Once I bring up Konsole, I can
move, resize and otherwise manipulate the window with the mouse as
normal.  I can select text in the window by clicking and dragging.  But
I still cannot do anything with mouse clicks outside the window.

In console, I can kill the plasmashell and manually restart it.  Once I
do that, the desktop responds to the mouse normally until I restart the
VM.

I've logged in as root and completely deleted ~/.kde4 (under my normal
login) and rebooted without fixing the issue.

Since restarting plasmashell causes everything to work normally, I
believe this is a KDE issue and not a Virtualbox mouse issue.  I
suppose it's possible something isn't working right with the virtual
mouse when KDE first starts and it is working right later when I
restart plasmashell, but that seems unlikely.  If it matters, the host
machine is also Gentoo running KDE.

Any ideas or suggestions for resolving the issue greatly appreciated.