How do you find a lion in the desert? You build a fence around the half of the desert, the lion is found in and confine it to half of the desert. Then you build another fence in the half of where the lion is to confine it to a quarter of the desert, and another fence and another fence until you fully confine the lion.

I've used this technique (otherwise known as Binary Search) to isolate this Mandriva bug. I knew that when running my configurtion of the KDE environment, my windows jittered, while when not running the KDE windows manager, or in a new user's KDE setup, everything was OK. And when moving away ~/.kde it was also OK. So I had to find what in .kde causes that.

At first I guessed it was some file in ~/.kde/share/config. This was indeed the case, as a fresh .kde with my original config directory copied on top exhibited the problem. Then I incrementally copied files from the "bad" config directory to the "good one". I started with a-j, and l-z and they did not reproduce the problem, as most of the config files start with k. Then I used several ranges of letters that start with k. So I covered k[a-k]* (not reproduced), k[l-z]* (reproduced), k[l-s]* (not reproduced), k[t-z]* (reproduced), k[t-v]* (not reproduced), and k[w-z]* (reproduced). Then I guessed it was probably kwinrc and indeed it reproduced the problem alone.

Now, my kwinrc was long so I started deleting directives out of it to further isolate the problem. After a long time of deleting and keeping several "kwinrc.good" and "kwinrc.bad" files, I discovered that it happens only with the Keramik windows style, and the focus-follows-mouse option. So a workaround for that is to use a different windows' style. All of this took a long time.

Other bugs I discovered:

1. a mikmod -n bug - this was an old bug in the libmikmod core code, which only surfaced on this update. It was fixed since it was reported.
2. xine cannot play this MOD file, or this one, and probably many others. (As I discovered now, MOD Archive contains at least 7 different versions of the Airwolf theme, all of them different from what I have. ) This bug was not reported yet.
3. mplayer -ao arts no logner works. This change was intentional and I spoke with the packager who did it about it via email. mplayer without the -ao flag or with -ao alsa works fine in KDE.
4. The Mandriva Galaxy (Classic) Theme flickers when the text in the title decoration of the window changes. This is especially annoying with a new kmail message that updates the title according to the subject. This bug was not reported, either.

On a different note, I ran Mandriva One on a machine at home, with AIGLX enabled. The 3-D Windows' management effects are very cool!