This problem has been perplexing me for a few days, and I have yet to find a truly relavent answer to this anywhere. I'm running XFCE on Gentoo 2005.0, and suddenly the other day (I don't remember doing anything specifically unusual) all of my gnome-native apps (gedit, gpdf, rhythmbox, etc.) stopped working. gedit simply quits when called, and rhythmbox goes into a strange infinite loop of restarting itself over and over. However, each program gives me the same error -- in the terminal where it was started, it has:

(gedit:9392): Bonobo-WARNING **: Failed to get '/desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_detachable': 'Adding client to server's list failed, CORBA error: IDLmg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0'

Unfortunately, I really have no idea what this means... I know I have gconf installed, but I'm not exactly sure if it's running, or if it isn't, how to start it. All I know is that it was at one time working, and then it suddenly stopped for whatever reason...

Thanks for any help!

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla...?buglist=89490

may offer a clue, or you could try quitting out of the gnome session and deleting /tmp/orbit-$user

I tried rebuilding ORBit and gconf, as well as the bonobo library (CORBA), but that didn't fix anything. Also, /tmp/orbit-$user doesn't exist at all on this system. The wierdest thing so far, though, is that I tried running GConf-editor, and it started (after giving me that same error about not being able to connect the client to the server [like above]). But in it, it shows NO settings at all! I know there used to be a lot of stuff listed there, but now there's nothing at all. Does anyone know what this could mean?

$user is you username right? So if your username is rcrules then you'd look for /tmp/orbit-rcrules ... just checking

Goodness knows about gconf-edit ... but if it cannot connect then it cannot get any data - so there is no wonder it is tabula rasa.

rebuilding probably keeps the setting/config files in place - that is, if your problem lies with those files. That would seem reasonable, since the new build should eliminate any problems with the program itself.

beyond that - BIIK - you could read through the opbit and gconf docs on your system?