Bug#670097: gnome-shell: random hang causes data loss

[Brent S. Elmer Ph.D.]

I have had this problem on two different computers starting in the last
day or two.  Both are running Wheezy and I generally apply updates
daily.  One of the computers is a Lenovo w500 laptop with a radeon video
card and I am using the free radeon video driver.  The other is a
desktop with an Nvidia card and I am using the proprietary Nvidia video
driver.  The laptop is my work laptop and froze 3 times yesterday and
has frozen twice already today.  When this happens, the image on the
screen freezes.  I can move the mouse and see it moving around the
screen.  I can do ctl-alt-f1 ... to get to other terminals.  When I log
in from the terminal and do a top, nothing is taking excessive CPU or
anything.  One time I left the screen frozen while I ate lunch to see if
it ever would come back but it didn't.  I can do ctl-alt-backspace to
restart X and I am brought to the login screen where I can log in again
and work for a while until it freezes again.