Hey all. I can run mousepad from the terminal as myself quickly and easily enough, but always have a major hang when trying to run the command as root. Apparently it takes the time to start some SCIM daemon, one which I thought I had disabled. It also shows up in the notification tray after I have started mousepad (in pypanel) several times. Does anyone know of any solutions other than disabling SCIM altogether? This is on a fresh Slackware install, and I didn't have this problem the last time it was on this box.

Here's the terminal output as root:

scim is a multi-language IME system. Every user is given a separate instance and configuration, and so when you run an app as root it has to load so that root can input multiple languages.

First off, do you even need an IME? Unless you need to type in any non-alphabetic foreign languages like CJK, arabic, or whatnot, then you can simply uninstall scim (and whatever language backends are installed) completely.

Otherwise, you probably have an application named im-switch or im-chooser or something that you can use to turn it off.

There are also 3 environmental variables that can control which IME is used.

GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
QT_IM_MODULE=scim
XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM

Try changing them to "xim". That should be enough to disable calling scim up when most applications are run. im-switch should change them for you if you run that.