user account crash

[Jeremy Anderson]

On Friday 22 June 2007 18:17:39 D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> 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

Please don't forget to look at log files in /var/log or wherever else the 
program you are trying to run put them.  Syslog messages are usually pretty 
good.   Running an app from the command line like Michael said is always a 
good idea too.  

Jeremy