user account crash

[Rod Joyce]

On Friday 22 June 2007 22:58:34 Nicolas Ouellette wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
>   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.
>
>   I'm trying to figure what could've happened, but I'm clueless. A stale
> lock file somewhere? A virus? An X authority problem?  I don't know what or
> where to look for.
>
I have had similar problems with openSUSE 10.2 on an x86_64 and an i386 
machine. Both machines reported segmentation faults.
On the x64 applications began to fail one by one, starting with pan and 
finishing with nearly everything. Using Konsole or a VT helped not at all.
I couldn't find the cause of the problem ,so I created a new user account and 
copied my files to it. The x64 has 1.5 GB RAM so this didn't take very long.
The i386 is OK except for multimedia apps - kaffeine, and amarok will run once 
and then refuse to start. The only way to get either app to run again is to 
uninstall and then reinstall them with YaST (the SuSE app manager). 


Although I have used SuSE since 7.3, I was very disappointed by the latest 
version, so I have just switched the x64 machine to Feisty. So far I am very 
impressed. 
I am going to install the i386 version on the old machine (a 7 year old Dell 
with a few hardware upgrades) on Sunday.
Rod