Unable to change window focus

[Vladimir G. Ivanovic]

Yesterday sometime, I lost the ability to change window focus. If I
move the mouse over another windows, focus doesn't follow the mouse
even though focus-follow-mouse is set in the
Desktop->Preferences->Windows dialog box and has been this way
forever. Changing to click-to-change-focus didn't help.

I can "reset" the correct behavior by switching workspaces, but as
soon as I click with the mouse on anything, I lose the ability to
change window focus. Keystrokes continue to be delivered correctly to
the window which has focus.

The clipboard doesn't seem to work either. If I select some text, I
can't paste it into another window. I also can't Paste text that has
been Copy'ed.

Finally, mouse clicks don't seem to be delivered to the root window
(desktop) although I can click-drag and select a desktop icon. The top
and bottom panels behave like windows (i.e. a mouse click disables
focus changes, etc.) although selecting a panel menu item doesn't
screw up changing the window focus. Selecting application menus does
seem to screw up window focus.

I noticed these changes in behavior after I has installed VMware
Workstation 5.5 (beta), but I don't think the two are related. 
Regardless, I have uninstalled VMware Workstation and I have rebooted. 
I still can't change focus.

I am running Metatcity 2.11.2-2. Changing back to Metacity 2.10.3-1
didn't help.

I don't see that I've installed anything that could be causing this
problem (see list appended below) and the only hardware change has
been to move a USB device (iPAQ cradle) to its own port from a hub.

I'm using the following yum repositories:

   atrpms.repo
   base.repo                                    # Fedora RPMS from Freshrpms
   fedora-devel.repo
   fedora-extras-devel.repo
   fedora-extras.repo
   fedora.repo
   fedora-updates.repo
   freshrpms.repo
   jpackage.repo
   livna.repo

I'm fully updated except for geronimo-specs* and struts11 which have
dependency problems.

I didn't see anything in the system log file that seemed relevant.

Naturally, any help or ideas would be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

--- Vladimir

-- 
Vladimir G. Ivanovic
Palo Alto, CA 94306
+1 650 678 8014

Aug 22 00:01:07 Updated: OpenEXR.i386 1.2.2-5.fc5
Aug 22 00:01:15 Updated: bluefish.i386 1.0.3-1.fc5
Aug 22 00:01:17 Updated: OpenEXR-devel.i386 1.2.2-5.fc5
Aug 22 02:00:50 Updated: uim.i386 0.4.8-1.fc5
Aug 22 02:00:51 Updated: uim-qt.i386 0.4.8-1.fc5
Aug 22 06:24:38 Updated: gaim.i386 1:1.5.0-4.fc5
Aug 22 06:24:19 Updated: openoffice.org-core.i386 1:1.9.125-1.2.0.fc5
Aug 22 06:24:20 Updated: <all the openoffice.org 1:1.9.125-1.2.0.fc5 packages>
Aug 22 07:01:45 Updated: awstats.noarch 6.5-0.1.050822.fc4
Aug 22 07:01:46 Updated: perl-Mail-Alias.noarch 1.12-6.fc4
Aug 22 08:01:53 Updated: awstats.noarch 6.5-0.1.050822.fc5
Aug 22 08:01:54 Updated: perl-Mail-Alias.noarch 1.12-6.fc5
Aug 22 12:02:20 Updated: MyODBC.i386 2.50.39-25.FC4.1
Aug 22 12:02:22 Updated: dhcpv6.i386 0.10-14_FC4
Aug 22 12:02:22 Updated: dhcpv6_client.i386 0.10-14_FC4
Aug 22 12:02:27 Updated: system-config-netboot.noarch 0.1.30-1_FC4
Aug 22 14:02:26 Updated: diskdumputils.i386 1.1.9-2

RPMs installed hand:
  673  rpm -Uvh VMware-workstation-e.x.p-15576.i386.rpm 
  682  rpm -Uvh VMware-workstation-e.x.p-15576.i386.rpm 
  790  rpm -Uvh /mnt/hde1/scarlatti/usr/local/local/tmp/VMware-workstation-5.0.0-13124.i386.rpm
  846  rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/4/i386/RPMS.lvn/livna-release-4-0.lvn.5.4.noarch.rpm
  992  rpm -Uvh /usr/local/tmp/libpixman-0.1.2-1.2.fc4.rf.i386.rpm 
  996  rpm -Uvh --force /usr/local/tmp/metacity-2.10.3-1.i386.rpm