Ubuntu Lucid upgrade nuked my window frames!

So I recently upgraded my Ubuntu/Karmic install on my laptop to Ubuntu/Lucid. As part of working on and attending DebConf10, I starting using Ubuntu a lot more than Mac OS X, so I thought that some newer versions of the software would make things run smoother. For the most part, it did, except for one major annoyance: upon logging in, none of my windows had frames and they all would stack up in the upper left corner and act funny. Often my keyboard would stop working all together. So my windows were sans “decorations”, the term I learned in the process of lots of searching. Turns out there are many Ubuntu bug reports related to missing window decorations, but none of them seemed to apply to my situation.

There is one thing that would make my window decorations reappear: compiz --replace. But I’d have to run that manually every time. Ug, what a pain. I tried deleting things like ~/.metacity and ~/.compiz and still no luck. I tried setting the Visual Effects to None in the Appearance System Preferences. Still no luck. Then my MacBook croaked so I copied my home folder to a little HP Mini 210 netbook, and voila, it had the same problem. Only this time this machine didn’t have the GPU to handle compiz, so I was only using metacity.

Finally after even more searching around, I found the answer to my problem: the GNOME saved-session! I grepped in ~/.config/gnome-session/saved-session/*.desktop for “compiz” and found there was something in there that was starting compiz in a particular way. I removed that and presto! I now have window decorations when I login. Aaahhhhhh….