KakaoTalk-on-Wine chat windows open collapsed (~160px tall) after a monitor hotplug — fix is a FULL restart, not closing the window

Claim: On KakaoTalk running under Wine (GNOME/Wayland, multi-monitor), after unplugging/replugging an external monitor newly opened chat windows come up collapsed to ~160px tall (and sometimes clipped at a screen edge). The reliable fix is a full restart of KakaoTalk — because closing a chat/main window only hides it to the tray; the process keeps running with the pre-hotplug screen geometry cached and keeps mis-sizing new windows.

Root cause#

KakaoTalk computes chat-window size at open time from the display geometry it cached at launch. After a monitor topology change, that cache is stale, so chat windows open collapsed.
There is no persisted "chat window size" key to edit. user_pref.ini stores main_wnd_last_pos_v2, emoticon_wnd_size, photo_wnd_size, moim_wnd_size, but nothing for chat rooms. So a config edit cannot fix it directly.
Closing the window ≠ quitting: KakaoTalk stays in the tray, so the stale geometry persists across "reopen".

The fix (clean, keeps normal separate windows)#

Fully quit KakaoTalk (tray → 종료, or kill the process) and relaunch after any monitor change. On relaunch it re-reads current geometry and chat windows open at normal size (verified: chat window opened correctly after a true full restart; the same session had failed for a long time only because the app had never actually been restarted — just window-closed, PID unchanged).

One-shot helper installed on this machine: ~/.local/bin/kakao-restart (kills all KakaoTalk PIDs excluding shells, waits, relaunches wine KakaoTalk.exe).

Approaches tried and rejected#

Move-only reposition script: fails — the problem is size (height 160), not position; the collapsed window is often already inside the primary monitor.
Resize nudge (grow +150 then back to original): fails — returning to the original size restores the broken 160.
Background watcher that auto-resizes collapsed windows: unreliable (timing: it marks a window "seen" before/after the collapse) and the user disliked a polling daemon.
Wine virtual desktop (explorer /desktop, or HKCU\Software\Wine\Explorer\Desktop=Default + Desktops\Default=1600x1000): this DOES fix it robustly (Wine sees one fixed screen, immune to host monitor changes), but it forces all KakaoTalk windows into a single container window — rejected as an inconvenient UX.
Manually resizing the collapsed window to ~480x820 with xdotool windowsize fixes that one window and it stays fixed (KakaoTalk doesn't fight it) — useful as a one-off but doesn't survive reopen.

Gotchas for the debugging agent#

xdotool windowmove/windowsize works on these Wine windows; detect collapse via xdotool getwindowgeometry --shell (WIDTH≥400 && HEIGHT<400).
pkill -f KakaoTalk / pkill -f <script-name> kills the running shell/script itself because its own command line contains the pattern — kill by PID, filtering out shell comm names, instead.
Killing wineserver closes every app in the prefix; fine here (KakaoTalk-only prefix) but note it.

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-16T02:41:04Z#

verdict: ok
note: Wine/Wayland 창 크기 캐시 이슈와 완전 재시작 권장은 여전히 타당함

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-18T03:58:22Z#

verdict: ok
note: 최근 변경 징후 없고 Wine/카톡 트레이 재시작 원인·해법도 일관됨

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-20T05:19:58Z#

verdict: ok
note: Wine 앱 재시작으로 지오메트리 캐시를 갱신한다는 권장안은 여전히 타당함

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-22T06:53:26Z#

verdict: ok
note: 최근 재검증 후 변화 징후 없고 Wine/트레이 재시작 권장도 여전히 타당함

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-24T09:22:13Z#

verdict: ok
note: 최근 검증 후 변화 가능성 낮고, Wine 트레이 종료 주의도 여전히 유효함

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-26T12:28:03Z#

verdict: ok
note: 특정 Wine/KakaoTalk 동작 노트로 최근 검증 이후 바꿀 근거 없음

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-28T18:58:54Z#

verdict: ok
note: 최근 변화 근거 없고 Wine/트레이 재시작 권장도 여전히 타당함

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-07-31T00:35:07Z#

verdict: ok
note: 최근 재검증 후 변화 징후 없고 경험 기반 해결책도 여전히 일관됨

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-02T11:08:16Z#

verdict: ok
note: 전일 검증 이후 관련 Wine/KakaoTalk 관행 변화가 없어 재사용 가능

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-06T10:17:22Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-08T20:33:15Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-11T07:57:53Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-13T20:39:01Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-16T09:47:22Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-18T21:21:05Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-21T09:34:52Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-23T22:06:33Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-26T10:31:05Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-28T23:08:38Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-08-31T11:16:06Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 401] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-09-03T02:18:23Z#

verdict: ok
note: 최근 검증 후 변화 여지 낮고, Wine/트레이 동작 설명도 재사용 가능

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-09-09T04:34:37Z#

verdict: ok
note: [chatgpt HTTP 404] {

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-09-11T19:06:38Z#

verdict: ok
note: 이틀 전 재검증됐고, Wine/KakaoTalk 기동 시 geometry 캐싱·트레이 잔류 동작은 변함없어 내용 전체 유효.

Sagwan Revalidation 2026-09-15T12:54:39Z#

verdict: ok
note: 최근 반박 근거 없고 완전 재시작 권장도 여전히 재사용 가능