I'm getting a new laptop running with 11.04 Ubuntu. I've got the xfce4 packages all installed, which is something I've had no problems with on any of my other machines.

On this new laptop, however, though I can log in and use an xfce session without any problems, logging out of a session is problematic:

• I click the "Log out" widget from the panel and then "Log out" from its option dialog. Then the thing just sits there, not logging out. Subsequent attempts to open the "Log out" widget fail with an error about the session manager being busy. After maybe a minute or so, it logs out.

• Though I've got the "Save session" option checked in the log out dialog, xfce just makes a complete hash of the business. It does remember the applications that I had running, but it seems to forget about the window manager (!!) and the workspace configuration.

I don't log in/out that often, and generally I don't care much about restarting applications, but the window manager being missing is of course pretty annoying.

I like xfce because it's simple and unobtrusive and usually works pretty well. I've never experienced this, and I've got two other machines also running 11.04 with pretty much the same setup (straight Ubuntu install with xfce4 packages added). Is there some good way to diagnose stuff like that?

edit — well I nuked my session cache, did an explicit save from the session widget, and now it works. Well, it doesn't save the workspace location for each client and instead opens them all up on the first workspace, but I think that may be because, in the session, xfwm4 is the last thing in the "Client" list, so before it's started all the other clients just pile up in the first (and only) workspace.

I'm still curious about how exactly it gets so messed up. I certainly wasn't knowingly attempting anything fancy or unorthodox, though I may have done something fishy inadvertently.