sorry to be such a bother, but as long as i'm bringing things up, here's 
one that has been an issue for a couple of years and survived into R14.

my desktop crashes, but in such a way as to not even be noticeable at 
first.

i have in lieu of wallpaper xplanet set up as a realtime moon phase 
indicator, updating hourly. the way i tell the desktop has crashed is that 
it doesn't update -- in this case it last refreshed at 10:30 a.m. 
yesterday. i believe that i was probably editing pictures at that time, 
though would not swear to it.

after it crashes, a right click on the desktop does not produce the 
expected menu. as it happens, kicker and everything else continues to 
function as expected -- in fact, it was just now that i noticed that the 
desktop itself had gone south.

i thought i'd look in the x error log, bit i see that the one i have, 
~/.xsession-errors, is of an unspecified file type and won't open in a 
text editor (it reports its size as 500.0 k).

any idea if there's a log that might let me see what's going on here and if 
so what log it might be? bonus points, how i might restart the desktop 
without logging out and back in? extra bonus points, how i might fix it so 
it doesn't do this anymore? i'm running some flavor of ubuntu 12.04LTS -- 
i say some flavor because when i sought to upgrade a few days ago the 
ubuntu upgrader refused, citing third-party apps or a beta version of the 
opsys, or something; it didn't specify. i thought i had bog standard 
12.04LTS on the machine but am apparently wrong.
-- 
dep

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