So being without IRC (and thus the usual things that keep me occupied) I decided to try Gnome3 (again). Guess who has an almost usable Gnome3 Desktop + fglrx drivers... That's right, no fallback mode, just some keybind editing in a config file so that I could get a terminal up and logout/restart Gnome-shell when I make a change.
It doesn't like XRandR or Xinerama with my card, but at least I see two desktops and can drag windows between them. The graphics on that top bar still show up corrupt, and I have no mouse input in any Gnome-shell applications, but I can click around inside of a browser and gnome-tweak-tool.
I don't know what in the world would cause the mouse to not pass events to the toolbar (and yes, I installed all of the extensions and enabled them in gnome-tweak-tool before passing judgement), but something is fishy here.
It's almost like there's a disconnect between the graphical representation of the mouse, and the actual events being passed by the mouse. Kinda like when some apps glitch out on you and you have your mouse far to the left of a button, but the button thinks the cursor is planted right on top of it. I'll mess around with it some more. As soon as I can cleanup my config files and stuff, and get at least mouse input, I'll submit the files to Joost so that he can take a look at them and check my testing (that's what Limbo is for right?

). Maybe it's not so much a bad driver (it is), but some bad settings in gnome3 itself coupled with the bad driver. If I can cleanup some of the coding and add a few tweaks, that might clue in a dev in gnome-land as to providing a fix that will mesh a bit better with ATI users who can't use the radeon driver for various reasons (high-end cards don't like that driver).
Anywho,
/hijack