I am running Mandrake 10.1 Official with KDE 3.2.

My mandrake control center is not working any more. The first window ("wait while I'm loading", or whatever it says in English) freezes and stays on the desktop until I close the session.

This behaviour started after I tried to run for the first time the application K3b(it's a CD burner I think). That application crashed (the initial window saying "I'm scanning the system for CD burning devices" stayed on forever) and from that moment on

1) Every time I log in the GUI, K3b starts by itself
2) I can't use any more neither the CD-rom nor the CD-RW
3) The Mandrake control center is not working any more.

I get the impression that K3b keeps running somehow in the background, locking up the system, or that it did something wrong to the CD-rom/CD-RW configuration.

Any suggestion?

Thanks

I add also that

Harddrake freezes also, while RPMdrake works.

Using KDE monitoring system I can see that there are listed, in the process table:
-) 1 K3b process
-) 2 Harddrake processes
-) 4 Control center processes

but I can't get to killing any of them.

Hello,

I would suggest to search for lock files and remove those having something to do with your problems :

find / -xdev -iname "*.lock"

I would also disable a KDE session feature : try the option asking for allways starting a new blank session (without trying to restore former applications declared as still running in KDE). This option should be the default.

OK thanks, the second suggestion did the trick...

However, what are lock files?

Hello,

Lock files are dummy files created by some applications for example to prevent starting more than one occurence at the same time. When the application starts, it checks the existence of the lock file, and exits if such a file already exists. When an application crashes or is interrupted, it may happen that an existing lock file remains on disk...