Hi all.... It's me again (: This time, I think I might have some useful information if anyone is actually trying to figure out why upgrades have been of the failing persuasion... Anyone who has wasted time reading my drivel may know that I attempted to do an upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic with less than stellar results. A week or two back, I decided to do a clean install to see if that would help -- but I kept my ~ exactly as-is, mounting it in with the same username, etc as before. Some of my issues went away, but I had some really annoying ones, especially to do with removable storage: 1) plugging in an external drive resulted in no new visible device 2) inserting a blank or written cd / dvd would often not show up as any media inserted (if the media was written, it wouldn't be mounted and wouldn't mount if I clicked the icon in the Places menu; if the media was new, brasero would complain that I needed to insert new media before I could write out my dvd). 3) Often, starting palimsest and then re-performing the plug or insert procedure would cause things to "come right" -- the media would be visible and browsable / writable On a whim, and because I've actually seen something like this work in the past when there was a fairly major upgrade to GNOME, I deleted (well, moved, to backup locations), the following (after logging out, of course): ~/.local ~/.gconf ~/.gconfd Logging in again, I found that I (naturally) had to set up my desktop the way I liked it (colors, icons, panels, applets, etc) -- no big surprise there: I did just delete all my preferences. What is suprising, however, is that removable media now work again -- new icons appear on the desktop on insert/plug, the media is mounted when I click on the icons and optical media is recognised and burned by brasero. I wouldn't really know where to start trying to hunt down the problem -- but I was wondering if someone with a little more savvy would like to take a crack at it? I still have the problematic directories available. On another positive note: the disk utilities in Karmic are quite sweet. Palimsest is neat and warned me of a potentially failing external hdd. Nice! I haven't seen a similar feature set in one of the "other OSes" -d -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- There is no shame in not knowing; the shame is in not finding out.