I booted into Mandrake 9 today and some of my icons were changed to plain icons with ? marks on them. When I opened Mozilla I get a soundwrapper error problem. When I looked at the icon properties the script was "soundwrapper /usr/lib/mozilla". When I log out it now gives a big list of the generic users instead of just the 2 user accounts I had set up before. I dont have a clue what happened. Someone please help!

Also if I try to log out of my user acct. and into root via graphical greeter it starts with a command line only. I type "startx" and it says graphical server is already started. If I exit and login with a standard text greeter I login as root, then type "startx" it logs in, then crashes in about 5 seconds and tells me to remove etc/.xo-lock (which Ive done).

Ok I have 2 questions:

When I log into KDE (or Gnome) I get a white command line box. If I type "startkde" or "startgnome" I can get into either one. If I close the original command line box it logs me out. How can I set it to just automatically go into KDE or Gnome without having to specify? I dont know how this changed but Id like to set it back like it was.

I tried fixing my menu and now its really screwed. Is there any way I can set it back to a default Mandrake menu?

Thanks

did you make any changes before this happend?
do you dual boot o/s's?
any errors on boot up?

if you delete the correct stuff in your home directory,
the software will act as though you are running it for
the first time, such as
rm -r ~/.kde* rm -r ~/.gnome*
if you are the violent kind, you can delete everything in
your home directory. It would be much safer to move
everything just to test things out.
like mv /root /poot
mkdir /root
logout then back in

I installed an app called "Corel Photopaint 9 for Linux" That I downloaded from Corel. I installed the app but I had problems with it and got to looking in its installed directory and saw a bunch of wine files and references. I couldnt really figure out whether it was for Linux or Wine so I deleted the dir it was installed in-usr/lib/corel I think. I then installed Photoshop under Wine. The installation went fine and I ran PS for a minute to make sure all was well and it was. Then I turned on AMSN (I know but my family 3000 miles away uses M$N) and chatted with my dad. I tried to open Mozilla but it wouldnt open so I typed the command and it opened fine.

I left the box and at some time the wife rebooted into Win2K. The next time I booted into Mandrake it was screwed. The problem was with all accounts not just the user. I tried to create a new account but I got an error:

cannot lock user lib because /etc/ptmp or etc/gtmp exist.

Things kept getting worse and Mozilla would not even run and I got errors about some KDE kicker could not launch or whatever. It was really like some virus but from what I hear thats almost impossbile on Linux. I tried doing and upgrade install and reinstalled KDE but it didnt make a difference.

I think it was the Corel software I installed. I knew I didnt have the knowledge to fix it , so I fixed it the easy way with a good ol' reformat and reinstall. Im sure some guys here probably could have fixed it in 5 minutes.