Puzzling Mouse Pointer behavior

[ticojohn]

I recently upgrade Buster to Bullseye AMD64 on my desktop. I am using XFCE and lightdm. I have a four core Intel CPU with 8GB of ram and a 250GB SSD. I noticed that when I open LibreOffice Calc from the application menu the mouse pointer will spin for up to one minute. During that one minute time I saw, using the System Monitor tool, that there was up to 20% CPU usage. Strangely, if I open LibreOffice Calc from a command line the spinning mouse pointer goes away almost immediately. Even more strange is that I also have Bullseye installed on my Intel NUC (2 cores, 4GB ram) and I do NOT see the same behavior when opening Calc from the application menu (the pointer stops spinning immediately). I also looked at the processes, using the top command, and do not see any CPU usage even close to 20% (it's about 3%). And even more weird, if I launch LibreOffice Calc from a command line the mouse pointer stops spinning immediately.

Has anybody seen similar mouse pointer behavior? Any suggestions as to what may be causing this behavior and where I might look to solve the annoying spinning mouse issue?

UPDATE: I took a look at dmesg and found something that MIGHT be relevant. Many instances of the following message that may correspond to when I was trying to open Calc from the apps menu:

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[ 3581.221240] audit: type=1400 audit(1624803537.857:57): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="file_lock" profile="libreoffice-soffice" name="/home/john/.mozilla/firefox/lngblrlj.default-1543606083744/key4.db" pid=3378 comm="soffice.bin" requested_mask="k" denied_mask="k" fsuid=1000 ouid=1000

And this is the message when I opened Calc from the command line:

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[ 3596.474170] audit: type=1400 audit(1624803553.108:62): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="rename_src" profile="libreoffice-soffice" name="/home/john/CaloryBudget/lu3378fa2p14.tmp" pid=3378 comm="soffice.bin" requested_mask="wrd" denied_mask="wrd" fsuid=1000 ouid=1000

UPDATE 2: This message also in dmesg. Doing some searching I find that Firefox now uses the cert9.db but LibreOffice uses cert8.db.

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[ 1476.337200] audit: type=1400 audit(1624801433.015:46): apparmor="ALLOWED" operation="open" profile="libreoffice-soffice" name="/home/john/.mozilla/firefox/lngblrlj.default-1543606083744/cert9.db" pid=2583 comm="soffice.bin" requested_mask="wc" denied_mask="wc" fsuid=1000 ouid=1000

[ticojohn]

Well, I think that my speculation concerning cert9.db is probably bogus. I have repeatedly opened libreoffice calc from the apps menu and see no coinciding entries in either dmesg or journalctl. So I am at a loss and still hoping for some feedback.

In the meantime I have created a desktop launcher that will open libre0ffice calc. With that launcher I do not see the endless spinning mouse pointer. I suppose that is further evidence that it is not the cert9 database file. If it were then I would likely see the same issue even when launched via command line. I am guessing, at this point, that it is something funky with XFCE.

I am not going to consider this solved as the issue of launching from the apps menu still remains.

[ticojohn]

Further observations have led me to believe that this may be some kind of xfce4 and gtk3 issue. Why? I found other programs that have similar long duration mouse pointer spinning when opened from the xfce desktop apps menu. Those other programs include Synaptic Package Manager and Gparted. I don't know what connection there might be between those programs but it is interesting that they exhibit the same spinning mouse issue as do the LibreOffice apps.

And it is really a mystery as to why I don't see the issue on the Intel NUC. Maybe just bad Karma. It would still be nice to get some feedback from somebody who might have a clue. I certainly don't.

[CwF]

this may be some kind of xfce4 and gtk3 issue.

...something like that. I see it too without any performance hit. After a few episodes of the annoying spinner it doesn't seem to return. But I do agree it's new.

[ticojohn]

this may be some kind of xfce4 and gtk3 issue.

...something like that. I see it too without any performance hit. After a few episodes of the annoying spinner it doesn't seem to return. But I do agree it's new.

Well, it's been going on for a week. More than a few episodes. But like I said, a launcher on the desktop seems to bypass the problem. Maybe the xfce maintainers will see the problem and come up with a fix. We can hope. Thanks for your response.