After upgrading to 10.0 from 9.0, nobody, including root, can browse to / using either konquorer or nautilus. It dowen't matter how the user tries to get to /, they just lock up until the process is killed.

Gentoo and midnight commander don't have the problem, and console works OK.

Any ideas?

(I don't know if it's it's related, but on one machine all the local users disappeared from kdm, only to slowly reappear one-by-one over several days.)

As usual, the true problem is revealed just after the plaintive cry for help.

On the first machine here it turns out the floppy was connected wrong (on many, if not most floppy drives, there are at least 7 wrong ways to plug in the cable). Apparently noone noticed the drive was non-functional for the past few years. I wouldn't have know if I hadn't decided to open 'er up and blow the dust out. I'm betting the others are the same way.

I don't know what that has to do with browsing /, or why Suse 7/8/9 didn't care but 10 does, but reconnecting the drive properly fixed the problem.

Excellent - congrats on solving the problem and thanks for posting back with the solution randm.

PS: Welcome to LQ!