dolphin fails
 

Upon firing up Dolphin, I get "The process for the file protocol died unexpectedly." I am running Slackware 14.0.

There are some bug reports similar to this but I have not found a good explanation of the cause, or of the fix.

Any pointers?

I have not encountered any problem with Dolphin, but you might take a look at /var/log/messages; it might contain some hints about what is happening.

That is a great suggestion...but I have already checked there, and find no messages. Thanks, though.

Have you tried running Dolphin from the command line? There may be more information forthcoming if you start it that way.
jdk

Nothing new learned when I ran from the command line. I tried that as root and as user, prior to posting.

A google came up with several bug reports, but nothing I could see (or looked at) provided any helpful suggestion as to how to resolve. Most were from a couple of years ago.

As a test, try using konqueror from the command line as a file manager and see whether you get the same error.

Do you mean Dolphin the file browser or Dolphin the emulator?
Either way i've used both on Slackware 14, and both worked fine.
What's it do? nothing at all, just go back to a blinking marker?

Dolphin the file browser. I went poking on that system last night, again, and I found that some files in /var/tmp would not delete, so I am suspicious that there is a file system problem. I will reboot and investigate further when I can, which will probably be the upcoming weekend.

I run about 20 systems, most with Slackware 14.0, a few with 14.1, and have not seen this problem on any of the others.

If I find anything, I'll post it here.

A power fail (thank you ice and freezing temps) solved my problem. When I rebooted the system, the root partition had a couple of FSCK errors, which were fixed. When the system booted, dolphin worked, and has worked for a couple of days.

It appears that the problem may be because of a corrupt or damaged partition.

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, and whose who read about it and considered whether they had anything to offer.

Thanks for the update. Now someone with a similar problem will get a tip about trying fsck.