When I restart xmonad with a M-q command my xmobar disappears. There's an xmobar process running and it's not obviously blocked. (strace shows it doing things, including recvfrom and writev both with non-zero positive return codes). Xmonad also appears to think it's there in at least some sense because there's a strut on the top of the screen. But instead of there being anything visible, I can just see the wallpaper window... This is all under LightDM/Ubuntu12.04. If I attempt to alter the "root window" (with something like display -window root some.jpg) the wallpaper doesn't change, suggesting that there is a wallpaper window lying on top of the "real root window". Also, the wallpaper responds to right-clicks and brings up a gnome-config type menu. So, perhaps my xmobar restarts underneath the wallpaper and is thus obscured. If so, how might I bring it to the fore? I'm running a cabal xmonad and xmobar on top of Ubuntu12.04, with an /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop that looks like: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=XMonad Comment=Lightweight tiling window manager Exec=gnome-session --session=xmonad Icon=xmonad.png Type=XSession and a /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/xmonad.session that looks like: [GNOME Session] Name=Xmonad session RequiredComponents=gnome-settings-daemon; RequiredProviders=windowmanager;notifications; DefaultProvider-windowmanager=xmonad DefaultProvider-notifications=notification-daemon Thanks, Michael