Hi. I have just installed Mandrake 8.1. Everything went very well -- more than I had expected. However, I encounter very bizzare behaviors only with certain applications, and only when logged in as a certain user in KDE.

First, there are applications that when called, by clicking their icon or choosing them from a menu, show themselves on the display for a split second, and then disappear. One example for such an application is Korganizer.

Then, when I use Konquerer, everything works fine, until I choose 'about Konquerer' from the Help menu. This causes the Konquerer to disappear.

A third bizzare behaviour I encountered is that when I try to accessthe KDE Help Center, I keep receiving the following error message: The process for the help protocol died unexpectedly'.

Oh, and there is another interesting phenomena - the installation put a CD-ROM icon on the desktop. When I was prompted to insert a CD by an installation program, and clicked this icon as an attempt to eject the CD (see about the inability to eject CDs in the other post) - all the icons disappered from the desktop. I could get them back only by logging out and then in again..

Again, all (or at least most of) these things happen only when I am logged in as one specific user.

I have a feeling all these problems are somehow related, but I have no idea what to do. As this is the VERY FIRST TIME I use Linux, please assume no knowledge or acquaintance with any technicalities if you are going to offer a solution.

Thanks

Try this......log off ur desktop and then log back in as root and see if u get the same results. If not it could be executable problems. Sometimes after loggin as root and then u log back in as user they work agian....don't ask y, cuz I don't know it just happens. As for ur mount prob. Mandrake 8.1 dosen't come with automatic superuser, where u can mnt ans umount by pressing the eject button. U can add it n ur fstab if u want to or try this command in ur console

umount /mnt/cdrom and then hit the eject button on ur cdrom and c if that pops it out

When I log in as root, some of these behaviours return disappear. But when I log in as that user again, they are back there.

umount does not show ny sign of error, but eject won't work...

How many cdrom drives do u have? ur gonna have to look and c what the name of that cdrom is....and then try

umount /mnt/cdrom <----whaterver that cdrom is...
this is supposed to unmount it to where u can eject it from ur cdrom drive

ok, by writing all the commands myself I managed to change CDs at last. The physical button won't work, but after unmounting, 'eject' works.

But does anyone know about the strange behaviours of programs under KDE? I found a brutal solutionfor myself: as I had nothing important to lose, I removed the problematic user and created a new user instead. But I have no idea what caused that problem.