hi everyone
seems that nobody knows the solution for this bothersome problem i have
3 months ago i had a fresh install of feisty fawn with XFS filesystem
everything was great
fast swift
last month, it started to have some problems, nautilus was very prone to hanging
sometime hanging also gnome-panels
and leaving my system so unstable that i had to reboot by hard reset..
no other way of rebooting worked.
this happened a few times until i cleaned .nautilus and .metacity
last week i noticed that ekiga, gnome.schedule, update-manager don't work anymore
for no apparent reason..
i did this:
delete .nautilus, .metacity, .gconf, .gconf2
purge and reinstall ekiga, gnome-schedule
tried to launch them via terminal to see what error they give
and found this:
update-manager shows the icon, but if i click on it doesn't open the window and simply hang there
ekiga doesnt start, not even if started by terminal, just hangs there with no error.
gnome-schedule doesnt start if started as root, starts and works fine if as user.
when started as root opens a white window w/o icons and text....just draws the outline and the maximize, close button.

since i DONT WANT to reinstall again i would love to repair the installation
if someone can help me, please leave a note.
i also reinstalled libpt.so package..
no luck.

i really don't have a clue where else to poke..

adopt my ubuntu! save me the burden on reinstalling it!

Sounds a lot like my problem.

so in the end i am not alone..
i dunno what to do, i hope i dont have to reinstall because is pretty bothersome for me..
everything started out of sudden..
before i had some problem with alacarte menues, and some other minor stuff
but now is really odd..
i dunno if i should really reinstall from scratch removing even /home at now, since i am not sure that by reinstalling i wont keep alacarte issues..

I haven't seen this problem myself. Have you tried using apt to update the system to see if the problem is resolved that way?

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade