11.10 red disks to move and resize windows

[kadstro]

I occasionally and inexplicably get translucent red disks with small white arrows inside that overlay the window I'm working with. The red disks appear with two white arrows at the corners and edges of the window and can be dragged to resize the window. There is also a larger red disk with four white arrows overlaying the center of the window that can be dragged to move the window.

What am I doing that makes these suddenly appear and more importantly, how do I make them go away when they do appear?

I just recently upgraded to 11.10 from 11.04.

[coffeecat]

What am I doing that makes these suddenly appear and more importantly, how do I make them go away when they do appear?

Those are the Unity MT Grab Handles. These are not enabled by default. Open CCSM (compizconfig-settings-manager) -> Uncategorised -> Unity MT Grab Handles. Disable the Toggle Handles. That option will tell you which key combination you are using to make them visible. There is no set combination, so they will be what you chose. If you do not remember setting them, then I don't know why they are working.

EDIT: the other answer to your "how do I make them go away when they do appear?" is to wait a couple of seconds. You don't have to disable what is a useful feature if you don't want to.

[kadstro]

Thanks for the explanation. The compizconfig-settings-manager is not installed on my machine and I see quite a few recent comments indicating that installing or using it can be troublesome. I'm not interested in creating bigger problems and more distractions for myself right now. Are there any simpler solutions I could try until things stabilize?

The grab handles don't go away in a few seconds or even in a minute; that's what is annoying. They do eventually go away. Maybe I'll have to experiment more to find out how to make that happen.

[coffeecat]

Interesting that compizconfig-settings-manager is not installed already. I believe it's needed to enable the grab handles, so perhaps something happened during the upgrade. Compizconfig-settings-manager itself is not a problem, but some of the compiz plugins are not compatible with Unity. I think the problems you read about are when people enable the incompatible plugins and don't heed the warning ccsm gives them about needing to disable something, which leads to breakage of the Unity desktop.

The fact that the grab handles don't go away in a couple of seconds suggests that something is wrong. If you install ccsm, you will at least be able to see what the settings under Grab Handles are, even if you change nothing. If you do, check that the fade duration is set to 150, the default.