Hi all,

Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this, I'm confused as hell.

Basically, my laptop overheated the other day, and I turned it back on and ran fsck manually. It went through its normal processes and fixed everything, and then froze when it was restarting. So I held down the power button in order to hard boot, it went through its checking again, this time with no problems, and rebooted... and hung again at the very end of the progress bar on fedora's splash screen. So this time, I hit the power button once (without holding down) and it shut down normally. I restarted and everything worked fine, except amarok was giving me the problem of "XML playlist could not be read" everytime I loaded. No big deal, but also gnome wasn't saving the way I placed the icons on the desktop. This had never happened before so I just let it slide.

Then last night, I thought maybe if I checked the "Save Current Setup" button before I shut down, it might fix things.

This morning when I try to log into gnome (bootup for the actual distro works fine, as well as other Desktop Environments and window managers) but when I try gnome it hangs when loading Metacity.

Does anyone know what's going on here? Thanks in advance.

check your .gnome, .gnome2 .metacity .nautilus etc.. folders in your home directory and make sure they didn't get screwed by the hard-resets.

how would I know if those folders got messed up?

I don't see anything odd about them at the moment.

try it out as a different user, if the problem goes away it's in your home directory. as for seeing if they are ok, try to move them or something to that nature:

mv .gnome .gnome.bak

will create a backup of the folder, if it has errors from the hard-resets you will find out.

Thanks so much.

I tried to log in as root, problem disappeared. So if I create that backup file, will gnome still load when I try it? I guess the error is in my home directory, but where?

Zip

yeah it will still load, but with the defaults ( your icons, custom menu entries, theme, etc.. will all have to be reset).

you didn't specify what filesystem you use or what check was ran against it, where could be anywhere. it might be a good idea to do a full filesystem check to make sure nothing else was damaged.

Well I tried the mv .gnome .gnome.bak trick, and it didn't work. Still takes about 2 mins to boot gnome for this particular user. Do I need to rm .gnome too? And should I do this for metacity and nautilus as well?

I think I did something wrong because my settings are still the same.

go ahead and try to move them all ( gnome related, .gnome, .gnome2, .metacity, .nautilus, .gconf2, etc...) to *.bak and see if any of them give you errors.