Xfce4 panel not responding to mouse(touch pad) clicks

Question

That is the gist of it; basically I can no longer click (LMB or RMB) on a tab to access a window, nor can I click on an item on the right of the xfce panel. The only way to change windows is by ALT+TAB or by pressing SUPER (configured to open whisker menu).

Steps to reproduce:
I believe what I did was: press ALT+F11 and then repeat to undo full-screen mode.

I have not been able to find anything about this in the bugtracker, so maybe this is a feature, but I wasn't able to find any settings regarding the issue.

Solution

I always got the same problem recently with xubuntu 14.04 My temporary solution is to type xfce4-panel -r in a terminal window to restart the panel.

Comments

[Nikita]

I am afraid that stuck keys aren't the issue. I have written how you may reproduce the issue (if you're so inclined).

[Adam Brisebois]

What version of Xubuntu (or Ubuntu) are you running? Which version of XFCE are you using (find About XFCE in your whisker menu). I am running 14.04 with XFCE 4.10, and have attempted to reproduce by using ALT F11 twice in a browser, without the listed effects.

[Nikita]

Same here, 14.04 with Xfce 4.10. The issue might be specific to Intellij IDEA, since I was working on it at the time. The only solution was restarting Xubuntu though. Btw, I too wasn't able to reproduce the issue. I'll just mark it solved.

[Pierre]

I am having the same issue with Intellij IDEA (where I spend most of the time anyway).

[Gavin Simpson]

I get this a heck of a lot too in Ubuntu 18 with xfce desktop. This workaround works perfectly. The problem seem to appear on regular occasion when I move the mouse to the top right hand corner of the screen. A permanent solution would be nice :)

[Claudiu]

For me this didn't work, an error box appeared saying that "panel could not be restarted" because no reply was received, or something like that. I killed the process and it respawned automatically: kill -9 `pgrep xfce4-panel`

[jave.web]

In case you don't know how to open terminal - open file browser/manager and use right click => open in terminal or maybe Tools > open in terminal :)

[user1282043]

This is it, still works on Ubuntu 16.04!