failed to attach to process in root terminal
 

Hello I posted this question in the suse forums but no answer and it's really been bugging me. when I try to run dolphin or the command cat in the terminal as root the terminal just hangs and when I monitor the input and output I get the message "failed to attach to process 8008" or whatever number corresponds with that process. I don't even know where to begin with this one...but any help at all would be greatly appreciated as this is all I do day and night now and it's driving my girlfriend crazy. thanks

Obviously we need more details -- is the root session with the local or a remote machine, is it across a LAN or WAN, what commands are being issued, what process, and so forth.

well yes I'm logged on as root through (su) but it's not a root shell (su -)dolphin works under root shell but the cat command is still a no go, and it's a local machine and it doesnt matter where its lan, wan, or no internet at all I still get the same results. and the commands being issued are dolphin, cat, iplist, and qtconfig are the ones that come to mind at the moment.

Please show an exact example with cat, with msgs if any.