user account crash

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Friday 22 June 2007, Nicolas Ouellette wrote:

> The scan is still running, so maybe something else will come up. The 100$
> question is: Even though it's almost impossible, could I've been
> infected?!?

Nothing is impossible, but I'm really not likely to wake up tomorrow a 
millionaire.  The odds of your getting infected with something are similar.  
It's probably something much more benign.

>   Since this morning,  95% of the apps I try to launch from my regular user
> account crash. This includes most KDE apps (konsole, kontact, kopete,
> konqueror, kaffeine...), most GTK apps (firefox, oofice).  Even if I logon
> to a GNOME session, everything also crashes. Other users are unaffected,
> though.

They crash, or simply fail to start at all?  Do you get a KDE crash handler 
dialog, or do you just see a spinning hourglass that runs for about 30 
seconds before giving up?

A spinning hourglass is your clue to run the application from a command line, 
and see what errors it reports (and then post them.)

If you get a KDE crash handler dialog, do you get a crash for each individual 
application, or are you getting a crash on something else, like, say, Kicker?

If you do get a crash dialog for KMail,and one for Konqueror, and one for 
digiKam, etc., then what do these crash dialogs have in common?

There's bound to be a clue.  An X authority problem is not a bad idea.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre