Bug report

Bug summary

• When Matplotlib shows two or more windows (figures), hitting Ctrl+C in the terminal will kill Matplotlib (as intended), but also bring the entire X desktop environment crashing down. The error logged in systemd/journalctl is:

  org.a11y.atspi.Registry[1907]: XIO:  fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server ":0"
  org.a11y.atspi.Registry[1907]:       after 331 requests (331 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
  

Code for reproduction

• A minimum code snippet required to reproduce the bug, also minimizing the number of dependencies required

import matplotlib
# doesn't seem to matter which, as long as it's interactive
#matplotlib.use("Qt5Agg")
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()
ax1.plot([1, 2], [3, 4])
fig2, ax2 = plt.subplots()
ax2.plot([1, 2], [3, 4])
plt.show()
# Then, hit Ctrl+C without closing any of the windows.

Actual outcome

• The output produced by the above code, which may be a screenshot, console output, etc.

<all windows vanish>
<then screen turns black>
<and you are back on the login screen>

Expected outcome

• A description of the expected outcome from the code snippet
• If this used to work in an earlier version of Matplotlib, please note the version it used to work on

Matplotlib version

• Matplotlib version, Python version and Platform (Windows, OSX, Linux ...)
• How did you install Matplotlib and Python (pip, anaconda, from source ...)

I had two matplotlibs installed, one from Git (2.0.0rc2+2914.g1fa4dd705.dirty) and is installed for Python 3.6, the other is 1.5.3 packaged by the official Arch Linux repository and is installed for Python 2.7. Could reproduce the problem on both.

Xorg version is 1.19.1. The problem affects GtkAgg, Qt5Agg, and WxAgg. Did not test Qt4Agg, but I bet it crashes too.