I have not had any luck in fixing this (and given that my VM is due a rebuild I may just switch to Mint) but I have discovered that toggling the maximised state of windows 'unsticks' them. Perhaps this is a rare bug that results from using Unity inside a VM.
I have written a script to toggle all windows, so working around this bug is now much easier:
#!/bin/bash # # Resets all Windows after triggering Ubuntu/VirtualBox windowing bug # # @todo Filter out windows we don't need, using grep for window in `wmctrl -l | cut -d " " -f 1`; do # Debugging #echo $window # Looks like doing just one axis doesn't work wmctrl -i -r $window -b toggle,maximized_vert,maximized_horz wmctrl -i -r $window -b toggle,maximized_vert,maximized_horz # Activate them as well wmctrl -R $window done
Further answers here as to how to investigate this are very welcome, but in the meantime I have logged a bug with the Unity developers.