Ubuntu :: Compiz Only Runs If Start It Gradually ?

A botched ATI proprietary driver upgrade caused a cascade of problems. I've installed this driver many times before, but this time something just went wrong. I may have made a mistake. There don't seem to be many complaints about the ATI 10.2 driver so this seems likely. Anyway things were quite unstable for a while. I had problems with nautilus (lost the desktop) and segfaults from compiz. I had to reinstall a lot of stuff etc etc.

Anyway, this episode has left me with a strange lingering malaise. I can get the machine into a state where everything works perfectly - the cube is fine and quite snappy, the desktop is all there; it looks great; New driver seems to be working OK. But when I log out and log back in there are problems.

Step 1:If compiz is the window manager during login it dies killing the nautilus desktop and leaving me without a window manager running (no window decorations). This is a nasty state to be in because you can't easily get at a terminal (yeah ctl alt F1 - but how to fix the window manager from there). I've got a keyboard shortcut for metacity which lets me recover from this state. But afterwards I can't get the desktop back.

If metacity is the window manager during login - no problem. I've got a desktop. It starts up fine. Everything looks good. But I'm running metacity and I want to run compiz. So now we try to get compiz running.

Step 2: If I enter "compiz -- replace" in a terminal compiz segfaults and doesn't put metacity back leaving me without a window manager again. Just before it segfaults it complains about not finding some expected graphics files. This seems to have something to do with cube caps [Edit=Not - see later]- but I've restored defaults there so ... Fortunately ctrl C gets me out of that and back to metacity. Or I use my shortcut. But gee whiz no compiz.

OK - here is where it gets interesting. If I go to the compiz settings manager and disable the cube, then compiz --replace works just fine. So it looks like something specific to the cube. This lets me get compiz running but without the cube.

Now things get really interesting. Once compiz is running, if I open the compiz settings manager, then I can enable the cube and in fact ... it works!

To sum up, I now have to go through the following procedure every time I log in.

1. Login in with metacity as default window manager
2. Disable the cube in compiz settings manager
3. Start compiz with compiz --replace
4. Enable the cube in compiz settings manager.

After doing that everything works fine ... at least until I log out.

The fact that I can get everything to work indicates that I've got the driver installed OK and it is working. But why should I have to go through this bizarre procedure each time I log in?

Notes:
1. The problem afflicts all users - so it probably isn't a user config file issue.
2. I've reinstalled compiz and a whole lot of xwindows stuff. Didn't help.
3. I will try downgrading the video driver to the previous version as a last resort. But if the problem is something I broke while things were messed up, downgrading the driver may not fix it.
4. I'll post the crash message compiz generates in a followup (I'll have to log out and back in to generate the crash so I can copy the message)