This one is driving me crazy, and if I can't figure it out in a few days, I'm going to have to reinstall Fedora. It started this morning after a reboot.

Basically, kdeinit is taking forever to load anything in KDE, and the cpu use gets close to 100%. There is nothing in any log to indicate a problem. If KDE hadn't been working really sweetly for days, I'd just assume that it was a dog, and install something else.

I'm using Fedora Core 1, with kernel 2.4.22-1.2173.nptl.
KDE3.2
XFree86-4.3.0-55
nvidia drivers 5336

the system is a 1.2GHz Athlon, with 1GB of ram.
GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with 64Mb of ram.
an abundance of hdd space, and good cooling.


Everything was working just great, and I was really pleased with the upgrade to KDE3.2. Much zippier, and nicer overall.

A few days ago I upgraded from XFree86-4.3.0-42 to 4.3.0-55. I didn't notice anything strange. Things still worked great.

Then, earlier this morning, I rebooted the machine after installing a new kernel... and then the problems started.

First off, there are NO error messages during a boot. Everything is loaded correctly, and is where it should be. Looking in /var/log/messages shows nothing strange. However, doing anything in KDE takes forever and ever. It takes over 4 minutes to get from the kdm login screen to my destkop. Opening any application in KDE takes a long time, sometimes minutes. During that time the cpu usage goes through the roof. top shows kdeinit using nearly 97% of the cpu. also, it seems like fonts are no longer being anti-aliased, though they should be, and my desktop no longer shows previews of image or text files. but it should. ~/.xsession-errors doesn't show any errors either.

Once I open a program, re-opening is nice and quick. Also, this problem did not exist until the reboot this morning.

I looked in every log I could find, and there is no indication of a problem. /var/log/secure shows everything being authenticated correctly; /var/log/XFree86.0.log shows X starting happily with the nvidia driver (AGP is enabled, as well as SBA and FW); messages shows nothing. dmesg is fine.

I don't believe it's an issue with either nvidia or X because glxgears gives about 3000fps. Tuxracer and ut2004demo play nicely. no stuttering or glitches. good framerate.

Still, I wanted to get to the bottom of this, so deleted everything in the /tmp directory, moved my ~/.kde directory, dropped to init 3, and forcibly reinstalled KDE3.2. That didn't help: same probem.

So a rolled back to an earlier kernel, rebuilt the nvidia drivers, and same problem. so I installed the 5328 nvidia drivers instead - nada.

I rolled back to XFree86-4.3.0-42 by doing 'rpm -Uvh --force --oldpackage', but that didn't change anything.

At that point everthing was as it was just after the upgrade to KDE3.2: older kernel, older nvida drivers, older XFree86 - and still kdeinit takes forever and ever. I have not yet gone back to KDE3.1.x simply because KDE3.2 worked splendidly for so long. but I honestly can't think of anything else at this point.

I've checked everything I can think of: networking and hostname; log files; I've disabled iptables, shutdown other services. but the problem persists.

If I can't solve this in a few days, I'm going to wipe the machine and do a total reinstall, and I'd rather figure it out instead.

Does anyone have any ideas? anything else I can try, or some other possible place to look for errors? this is really baffling me. help!

Someone suggested I turn off artsd, and that did the trick! Everything is fast again, just no artsd.