Hello. I am not too familiar with XWindows and therefore am unaware of the structure of the configuration directories, conf files etc, so I've tried to change Gnome settings via the apps installed.

I have Fedora 5 running Gnome on XServer. Everything seemed fine until 1 day I updated the workstation using yum and not paying much attention to what was updated. On next reboot, I find a few anomalies I assumed were new features and somethings just didn't work. I've applied several updates since, along with researching the web for similar problems, but to no avail. The specifics are below: -

o Terminal Window, now has a pastel yellow background. I'm not sure if this is a fault or enhancement.

o The keyboard no longer buffers keypresses, so holding down a key doesn't repeat the character.

o Preferred applications (Browser, email client) can no longer be found. When attempting to launch the preferred applications applet, A message: -
************************************************************
The Application "control-center" has quit unexpectedly.

You can inform the developers of what happened to help them fix it. Or you can restart the application right now.
************************************************************

This also applies to: -

Desktop Background Preferences
gnome-keyboard-properties

o If I go into the mouse settings the motion sensitivity and Drag drop Threshold are both at the leftmost position of the slider. If I change these, the mouse acceleration goes to the left too and the mouse performance becomes slow. Going back into the mouse options, the settings are all moved to the left on the sliders, so their settings haven't been saved, even though the mouse perfomance has changed for the worse.

o On first opening the applet, the volume control has the mic muted. I unmute and raise the slider of the mic and it will remain that way for the session, but shutting down the workstation and next reboot, the mic is muted again.

Any help on 1 or more of these problems would be greatfully appreciated.

Thanks.

So no-one in the linux community has a single suggestion on at least one of these problems?

Thanks.

Without knowing exactly what you upgraded, it could be difficult to fix your problem. Have you tries doing a current upgrade using yum?

If I may....I found some quirks in Fedora 5 and abandoned it. Some seem similar to your problems. You may have some conf file problems or you may have bugs I don't know. I switched to SuSE 10.1 and found better performance though a nest of little bugs quite all its own. You might take the sledge hammer approach and log in as root, and then create a new user with similar permissions to your regular account. That new user will have a brand new unmolested environment, in which you can check to see if the problems are solved. If so, move your personal data to the new account and delete the old account. Voila! Not elegant at all, but it's quick.

Updating either Gnome or Kde seems to be fraught with peril. You could try renaming your .gnome folder (from outside gnome) so that a new one is created when you log in.

If you have another desktop into which you can log (always a good idea, IMHO), you could uninstall and reinstall Gnome. If you don't have another desktop, I'd install one (if possible).