all windows in VM just disappeared

[Naja Melan]

I have a problem which I would like to resolve (or at least recover from) rather than just working around by killing the vm and restarting it.

Sometimes all windows of a guest just disappear. So far what I had done in such case was running qvm-start-gui in dom0. This sometimes works but in this case it briefly flashes the windows on the screen and then they disappear again. In the past I had sometimes seen this in an out of memory situation where it seems xorg got killed, but in this case I can't find anything like that in the journalctl of the guest.

checking with 'ps -auxw | qubes' I see that qubes-gui is still running, as is Xorg and xinit. ~/.xsession-errors had nothing noteworthy and /var/log/Xorg* don't exist in guest.

Trying to launch another gui app from the start menu, nothing seems to happen.

it's a fedora-26 template.

I'm wondering if there is any other mechanism by which I could relaunch the gui, reconnect to the display to avoid losing work when this happens.

Any help appreciated