I am plagued with the Curse of the Multiplying Xbiffs unto the fifth generation. Or very nearly.

At work, I run GNOME. One of the things on my GNOME Panel is a swallowed xbiff. So every morning when I log in, the Panel spawns an xbiff and then reparents it into the right-sized box in the bottom right of my screen. All very nice; keeps it out of the way of my serious windows and makes sure it's always visible. Lovely.

Only thing is, on some mornings more than one xbiff starts up; in this case one gets reparented by the Panel, and the other just sits there like a lemon and gets in my way until I kill it.

I thought about this for a while, and decided it had to be due to session management: when you close your X session with apps still running, the apps are all asked to save their state, so that when you next log in the same apps start back up editing the same documents. So the swallowed xbiff is saving its state into the general session-management file, and next time I log in the Panel spawns an xbiff because its configuration says it has to, but also the general session-management restart program spawns an xbiff because it's listed in the session file. Hence, two of them.

I tried to fix this when it happened by editing the ‘.gnome/session’ file to remove the bit about xbiff, but it appears that that file is cached in the session manager's memory during a running session and so editing it on disk has no effect; worse still, the hasty logout-and-log-back-in manoeuvre required to test this tended to spark the same problem again and I'd get three xbiffs when I restarted my session… But if I logged out and edited it from a virtual console, that worked better. I still got the occasional extra xbiff, but I knew how to get rid of them when they appeared.

After a while I got irritated with having to do this all the time, so I thought about it a bit harder and came up with an alternative solution: I reconfigured my Panel so that instead of spawning an xbiff it now spawns a small shell script wrapper, which unsets $SESSION_MANAGER and then execs xbiff. Now let's see it try to save its data, eh?

… Well, actually when I came back to work after New Year and logged in, there was an extra xbiff waiting for me like a belated Christmas present. How?

This time I got medieval. I logged out of my X session, logged back in on a virtual console, and ruthlessly went through all my ‘.gnome*’ config directories grepping for xbiff anywhere I could find it. There were several incomprehensible binary files (which might have been history of past sessions, or some such) that mentioned /usr/bin/X11/xbiff rather than /home/local/bin/xbiffwrapper, so I trashed the whole lot on the vague suspicion that one of them might have been at fault. Removed the xbiff from the session management file as usual, logged back in, no more problem.

Except that this morning, a spare xbiff appeared when I logged in. I am really starting to wonder what more I can do to get the hint across to GNOME that I ONLY WANT ONE OF THESE WRETCHED THINGS!