Spaces completely lost my windows!

[Doctor Q]

I've played extensively with Spaces. Today I had 4 Spaces, with multiple Safari windows and multiple TextEdit windows open in Space #1 and in Space #3. I moved back an forth quite a bit, but then spent some time opening and closing windows only in Space #1, finally closing all Safari and TextEdit windows there.

When I pressed F8, Space #3 had no windows open! In the Dock, Safari and TextEdit were active. If I clicked either of them in the Dock, I'd switch to that application's menus and see my windows from Space #3 listed in the "Windows" menu, but the window would not actually appear anywhere in any Space if I chose it from the Windows menu.

The same with control-clicking in the Dock; the windows were listed, but would not display.

The windows for a separate application I had open only in Space #3 were also gone. I hadn't used them in any other Space.

I tried control-click-Quit on TextEdit in the Dock, knowing that I should get a "Do you want to save the changes?" prompt. It played the alert sound but showed me no TextEdit window or prompt. I couldn't view my window, save it, or Quit without saving!

There seemed to be no clean way out, until I tried collapsing all windows into Space #1 (by pressing F8 and then C) and then disabling Spaces in System Preferences. Instantly, my missing Safari and TextEdit windows reappeared in Space #1. My windows from the other application are back too.

I re-enabled Spaces and everything seems back to normal.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Does anyone have any theories?

 

[Peace]

I have a theory..

By closing "all windows" in one space you actually closed all windows in the other space also.And if you have Safari or Text Edit set up in spaces to open in a specific space it goes wacky if you have an app in a space that it's not set up to use.

Try setting up Text Edit to open in every space.See if that helps.

 

[Cleverboy]

Mm... retrieving lost windows on the Mac. Maybe this might help you too...

Sorry I didn't suggest this the first time, but... can you bring up any OTHER window in Bookends? For instance, can you get the "Bibliography" window to show up? If you can cause any OTHER window to show up, hold down the "ALT" or "OPTION" key on your keyboard, and click the Green "Plus" or "Zoom" button on the title. It will maximize ALL windows in the application, and make them viewable in the current screen. Like the other suggestions, I can't imagine this not working unless somehow ALL of your windows are "off-screen" somehow. I did a little test for myself by moving a Window mostly offscreen, and without touching it, this was the quickest way to reel it back in.

See if that helps you. Does sound like a bug though (reproducible or not).

~ CB

 

[Doctor Q]

By closing "all windows" in one space you actually closed all windows in the other space also.

Your theory is better than mine (since I have none). But I know it didn't really close all my windows since they were still there, contents and all, once I found my way clear by temporarily disabling Spaces.

For the record, I clicked the X to close my windows in Space #1. I didn't use "close all windows" (option-command-w or shift-option-command-w).

 

[Fastshutter]

That sounds very similar to what happened to me the other day with iMovie. Spaces acted like it 'lost' the application, or that it had got stuck between two spaces. iMovie would appear when I moved from one screen to another (it would flash for just a second as I would move from window one to window two), and also appear in expose, but I couldn't click on it. I turned off spaces, restarted the app, rebooted the computer, but nothing worked.

After pulling my hair out, I found the EASY fix. Just did Window->Zoom. It brought the Application back into the correct window. No problems now.

 

[johny5]

There seemed to be no clean way out, until I tried collapsing all windows into Space #1 (by pressing F8 and then C) and then disabling Spaces in System Preferences. Instantly, my missing Safari and TextEdit windows reappeared in Space #1. My windows from the other application are back too.

I re-enabled Spaces and everything seems back to normal.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Does anyone have any theories?

I had a very similar problem tonight and have seen another thread mentioning it but cant find the thread again, thats how i stumbled across this one.
Basically using Adium, with the chat windows open. Using other apps at the same time I received notifications in adium to say new messages recieved so i clicked on the adium icon to bring up the chat windows, nothing!
I tried everything apart from pressing f8 BUT i did notice a weird thing, adium is set to show windows in ALL spaces and when I flicked between the primary space 1 and space 2 the adium chat window appeared for a split second!?
If i kept flicking between space 1 and 2 then i could see the chat window but very very briefly. the only way out of it was to quit adium and reload it. Ive never had this problem prior to Leopard.

 

[Morkelvdw]

Hi there! Have a bigger problem. My System Preference Window is stuck between Spaces. This happened when I installed "Dock Spaces" and the app reverted my usual 6 Spaces back to only 4. The System Preferences Window was open in Space 5 at the time. The problem is I can not access the System Preferences Window at all! See attached image.

 

[Doctor Q]

Hi there! Have a bigger problem. My System Preference Window is stuck between Spaces. This happened when I installed "Dock Spaces" and the app reverted my usual 6 Spaces back to only 4. The System Preferences Window was open in Space 5 at the time. The problem is I can not access the System Preferences Window at all! See attached image.

I've had that happen when I invoke Spaces while an application is launching and hasn't yet opened its first window, including System Preferences. But once I press F8 it goes into one of the Spaces.

What if you control-click on System Preferences in the Dock and choose Quit from the pop-up menu. Can you then launch System Preferences normally again?