Running FC2 on Thinkpad t20. Nothing weird installed. OpenOffice doesn't start; gedit, gpdf, file browser and other gnome apps take 10 minutes to start sometimes (other times they start normally) and double-clicking a file (such as a .tgz) doesn't open the associated application (such as File Roller). Tried reinstalling OpenOffice, using the FC2 rescue disks, running up2date, etc. Meanwhile, other things work fine-- Mozilla, Evolution, random things like GNUcash start and run with no problems. What could be wrong? Some permissions problem somewhere?

i had a similar problem once, make sure /etc/hosts includes
127.0.0.1 localhost

and your network config includes a loopback, check this by

ifconfig

and you will see an lo device

/etc/hosts includes the line:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

and ifconfig gives me my other devices as expected, plus:
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:5939 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5939 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:2491989 (2.3 Mb) TX bytes:2491989 (2.3 Mb)

And yet OpenOffice still won't start.