Why won't my desktop come back after switching away from desktop session?

Question

UPDATE

I still have Gnome/Metacity installed so I logged into that (still used KDM) and the problems listed below seem to not exist. I could go into Suspend and it will resume with no problems. Switching from my X session to a TTY session doesn't break anything. So I'm going to rule out Xorg, unless it's an Xorg issue caused by Kwin/Plasma/KDE (any variety still not sure).

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I'm running Kubuntu with Kwin (latest) as my window manager. I'm loving it, I'm ready to remove all things Gnome. I've updated to the latest Kernel (2.6.30) for the updates to the latest Intel graphics drivers since I have an integrated Intel (950?) graphics device.

After having resolved similar issues in plain-old-Ubuntu I'm having some regressions it seems with my display and can't seem to figure it out.

Everything boots fine, runs fine until I switch away from my desktop session. If I suspend to RAM or switch to a TTY session once I resume or switch back to my active desktop session my window manager doesn't come back properly. The bottom panel is gone however my background and widgets (Plasmoids?) appear. No windows are viewable, I can execute Krunner with Alt+F2 but it doens't show, however if I type anything and execute it seems to not mind running things, they just aren't viewable.

Where do I even start to look to find what is causing this? Which log will be the most helpful?

Answer 1

Where to look for the logs?
Check the /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/syslog files first for error messages. Also, take a snapshot of ps -ef output for the before and after scenarios to rule out any processes crashing when you switch back to the desktop session.

Suspend to RAM has been problematic, but the issue with switching to TTY should be easier to tackle.