This is quite strange

I run slackware 9. Yesterday I did a full slapt-get --upgrade, which upgraded a heck of a lot of packages (among them xfree86). Today, I start up Gaim (1.2.0) and find that only *half* of the little images which appear throughout the application are visible. The buttons are still there, and they're functional. But the images which identify them are missing.

Those missing include: the images usually present in the buddy list which indicate a given buddy's status, some of those in menu items (like the "star" near Help -> About, half of those in a chat window, and the default smiley set.

I thought that perhaps the upgrade had accidentally affected a little-used icon directory somewhere (I've found a few other instances of missing images, such as panel-drawer.png for wmdrawer, and xscreensaver's noseguy doesn't like me anymore), so I uninstalled and reinstalled gaim 1.2.0 (via make uninstall -> ./configure -> make -> make install), yet still had no luck.
So I uninstalled 1.2.0, downloaded and installed 1.3.0 ....and they're still gone. Aaargh...

Does anyone know where these images should be? Or why some of them are showing up, and some aren't? I'm not too familiar with where Gaim or X would be looking for those to be able to do more than guess.

For clarity's sake, here's a screenshot:
http://www.cybermenology.com/images/...crewy_gaim.png

Thanks, all!

the reason should be the theme you use for gtk+...
switch some other themes and try again...
i could not run gaim last night because of the baghira theme...
try some offical themes or base themes..

Hmm....what do you mean by "theme"? I use WindowMaker, so my themes/skins there really affect only basic window properties (and I've not had any issues before).
Like I said, Gaim _runs- perfectly fine - all the buttons work, even though you can't see them, and starting it from a console doesn't give any error messages.
The images just aren't showing up for whatever random reason.

Ah-HA!

I just ran gtkpod from the commandline and noticed that it, too was having image issues. However, it also was remarkably voluble with its error messages:

Failed to load pixbuf file: /usr/local/share/gtkpod/pixmaps/gtkpod-icon-48.png: Unable to load image-loading module: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Failed to load pixbuf file: /usr/local/share/gtkpod/pixmaps/gtkpod-icon-48.png: Unable to load image-loading module: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Failed to load pixbuf file: /usr/local/share/gtkpod/pixmaps/gtkpod-icon-48.png: Unable to load image-loading module: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Failed to load pixbuf file: /usr/local/share/gtkpod/pixmaps/gtkpod-icon-48.png: Unable to load image-loading module: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.2.0/loaders/libpixbufloader-png.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
...
and so on.

So I'm thinking that I somehow borked libpixbufloader. This also makes sense, since noseguy has refused to run since the same point in time, and has been complaining about failing to load image modules. Which is fine, as I'm reinstalling Slack to 10.0 this evening anyway. But I figured I'd post the probable solution, in case it helps someone else