Abort drag-and-drop from a busy program

Question

When the following happens:

1. I start a drag-and-drop operation, starting from application ABC.
2. Application ABC locks up (temporarily)
3. I release the mouse button

then, until application ABC finishes processing, I have the following problems:

• Other programs cannot "grab" the mouse pointer
• The drag-and-drop cursor remains active
• I cannot click anything
• I cannot open the gnome-panel or GNOME menu
• I cannot press certain keys (including space, enter, arrow keys)

Obviously, I then cannot do other work while waiting for the application to finish.

A situation when this occurs is when I have ~500 firefox tabs open, when dragging tabs it sometimes freezes for half an hour or so.

A workaround is to use a terminal by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1, log in, run killall ABC to kill the offending application, and press Ctrl-Alt-F7 to get back to the graphical environment. But I would rather not have to kill ABC, instead letting it finish processing, while getting my mouse back.

So, is it possible to forcibly abort a drag-and-drop / un-grab the mouse pointer from a busy program, without killing the process?

Answer 1

Can't you just abord the drag-and-drop by pressing ESC before releasing the mouse button? (sorry this should be comment, but I cannot comment)