kwin the culprit?

I think I have localized the source of my display woes. Noting that the problem manifests in part as garbage in the window decorations, I thought of kwin, the window manager, which to the best of my knowledge is responsible for managing window decorations. Last time the problem occurred, I killed kwin and started a new one. That did indeed clear the problem, so I just had to wait and see how long the fix would last.

It's now been several days! That is longer than I've ever managed to recover before. I think this might be it. I'm monitoring the memory usage of kwin now to see if I can blame a memory leak. It sure has that feel about it.

As an aside, it was amusing to try to restart kwin after killing it. Killing it took away the ability to switch the window focus, which was not in a terminal! I ended up having to use the mouse to copy and paste individual characters k w i n into a shell. Next time I'll set it up beforehand.