sawfish, gnome, and infinite number of workspaces bug

[jamapii]

Hi,

I have been using sawfish with gnome-2 most of the time, with 4 workspaces (not viewports, as I can tell from sawfish-config).

Sometimes (including now), the number of workspaces goes to roughly infinite (not actually, but I can't find the exact number, only that is is for practical purposes closer to infinity than to any reasonable number). There is a finite slowdown/hang of 30 seconds for closing or opening any window.

This might be related to updates or to the use of gnomes "Remote Desktop" / Desktop sharing / vino, but it does not go away by disabling it again.

Changing the number of workspaces to 5 in sawfish-config, then logout/login, fixed it only temporarily, after the next reboot it's broken again.

I'm aware that there may be no "official" solution, but is there any ugly dirty workaround? I can run a script from .xinitrc, if that helps.

Thanks for any comment

edit: it's a clean new install, amd64
sawfish is 1.7.1, but 1.6.3 had the same problem

[jamapii]

The problem went away after starting and stopping X with different windowmanagers a few times. I guess my startup configuration forces sawfish to start at some point. I got it back running and with 4 workspaces without manual intervention