So I'd finally got WineX working, and had been having a nice, quiet game of Quake III Arena. I'd even got around the troubling CD-mounting issues with Mandrake 9.1 and had installed Unreal Tournament 2003. Then I rebooted, and Gnome fell apart at the seams.

'gdmconfig' claims not to exist anymore. Evolution, Mozilla and Galeon all fail to start, each being unable to find one shared library or another. What's going on here? Did WineX (or my new NVidia drivers) somehow cause this to happen- I find it hard to believe that under Linux programs are free to delete themselves whenever the fancy takes them.

Also, how can I fix this? Can I just uninstall / reinstall Gnome and Mozilla (although who knows what other programs are affected). If I do a full Linux reinstall, how do I know the same thing won't happen again?

Things like this rather put me off Linux, and as I had it set up I would have been happy to stay with it indefinitely. I really don't want to have to go back to Windows.

Try naming the errors and missing shared libraries and we can start helping.

Fair enough.

'gdmconfig' just comes back with: 'galeon':'evolution':'mozilla' when typed into the console does nothing, just as if I'd pressed {return}. The panel button brings up the 'Starting Mozilla' button in the task list, which disappears after a while without Mozilla actually starting.

I've also found that the search feature no longer works. Clicking the panel 'search' button comes back with:Any help would be enormously appreciated.

This could be very bad. But dont try reinstalling such a vital package just yet.

Did you install WineX as root? From source? Did you do anything else while as root? Have you altered any gnome/gtk packages that you know of?

As this is Mandrake, you should be able to go to the Install Software menu item, and try finding gtk and lib gtk packages. Or search for those files which were reported missing, or that apps that dont work. If any show up as being on the cds still, you can try installing them as they dont seem to be atm. But steer clear of that lib c stuff, that's vital to almost everything.

I did a search for some of the missing files, and couldn't dig them up, and decided that the easiest diagnosis / cure combo would be to do a complete reinstall. This time I instaleld WineX first thing (after my graphics drivers) and after a reboot nothing's disappeared so far... but I geuss all this means is that I don't know what did cause the problems.

Thanks anyway... I'll gradually get better at fixing my problems without resorting to a Windows-esque format/reinstall as I get more experienced, I guess.