I am running Debian Sarge, and tend to apply all updates when they pass testing. A few weeks ago, Gnome 2.8 was updated. Since that time, every time I start Gnome I receive three errors:

"The show desktop applet appears to have died unexpectedly. Do you want to reload it? "
"The window list applet appears to have died unexpectedly. Do you want to reload it?"
"The workplace switcher applet appears to have died unexpectedly. Do you want to reload it?"

Answering "Yes" to each question will start the applet. I am at the point of switching to KDE. Can someone suggest why this is happening?


Thank you

have you check to see if there are any other updates. perhaps on your video card or gnome dependencies.

Thanks for your response. I don't have a fancy video card on that computer so I doubt whether there have been updates, but I will try to look at a backup I have, to make sure.

I have exactly the same problem with centOS RHEL4 GNOME on both of my quite different pc's. I've done extensive searches online without finding a solution. Fortunately minor. I set up both PCs' GNOME options similarly - mostly preferences. What could it be? I use the GNOME friendly graphical welcome screen. I enlarge my fonts on both pcs. I put thunderbird and firefox in the sessions startup list. That's about it. Both pcs have a video capture card and custom kernel with video for linux and i2c compiled.

Originally I had Gnome installed from the Debian Sarge DVD ISO with no problems with Gnome Desktop start up.

I was having trouble getting CUPS working at that stage, so I thought I'd rebuild and let X-Windows and Gnome re-install from the debian.org apt source.

Now I am getting these errors too after each reboot, if I log out and log back in again, the errors do not appear, they only appear after a reboot.

Seriously thinking about rolling back to the version of X-Windows and Gnome that I have on the DVD, however I do wonder if the CUPS problems will return if I do that . . .

Yes. I noticed the reboot effect as well.

The entire problem disappeared after I upgraded to kernel 2.6 by installing CentOS EL4.