After several months of not seeing this problem (last discussed in September), I hit it today after invoking "emacsclient -c". I've attached a partial screenshot. The background color looks right, and I see the region for the menubar, but the gutters, scrollbar, and modeline are all totally missing. Here's the relevant excerpt from the server log for two emacsclient invocations. The first one is for the bad frame, the second one is for a working frame. I can provide the entire server log if desired. Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: Status changed to open: open from - Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: server-delete-client Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: Received -env _=[...] Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: Sent -emacs-pid 1622 Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: # created Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: Status changed to open: open from - Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: server-delete-client Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: Received -env _=[...] Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: Sent -emacs-pid 1622 Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: # created (The environment has some values that I'd rather not post on a public list, so I've elided the environment from the above excerpt. The only environment difference between the 2 frames was some sort of tag that dmenu creates, e.g., DESKTOP_STARTUP_ID=i3/dmenu_run/5146-9-athyra_TIME3863103774.) Some things that I noticed that looked interesting: 1. # (the bad frame) refers to an address that matches a frame that was closed back on Friday. Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: server-handle-delete-frame, frame # Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: server-delete-client noframe Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: Status changed to closed: deleted Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: server-delete-client Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: Deleted 2. The bad frame does not appear in the results from frame-list: (frame-list) (# # #) 3. Doing an strace of Emacs showed zero activity when I moved the mouse over the bad frame or when I clicked in it. Also, I'll note that gdb shows the emacsclient process trying to read from the socket. AFAICT there is nothing unusual there. This was with Emacs 24.5. I plan to install 25.0.91 on the affected system tomorrow, but who knows how long it will take for the problem to reproduce. mike