When I run Gnucash,if I open the File menu, at the foot of the menu (immediately above "Quit" and "Close") it offers me a list of possible accounts. Unfortunately some of the names it offers are accounts that no longer exist.
Is there a way to remove these names?
Similarly, some of the valid account names were poorly chosen—is it possible to edit them?

Thanks

Check your /home/<user> directory for .gnucash in a File Manager.
You may need to press Ctrl+[hH] to 'see' the hidden dotted directories.

Rename .gnucash if it exists and restart GnuCash.
That's all I can think of without a Google Search, or installing the program.

Habitual's remedy sounds a bit drastic: I certainly wouldn't risk it! Have a look at
http://www.gnucash.org/
and its documentation, Wiki and FAQ
There's also a manual and a guide
http://gnucash.org/docs.phtml

I am going to call this one solved,although it would be better to say I am side-stepping the problem: I am going to drop Gnucash for a while.

For simple stuff, Grisbi seems more polished, and a much faster program.
To meet my needs for double-entry, I am returning to dual-booting between Linux and Windows, with Windows existing essentially so I can run Simply Accounting.

I do not adore Simply Accounting, but I find it a much smoother experience, and maybe next year Gnucash will be less rough around the edges.

Hey Brant, I posted about installing the ODBC drivers on your other post. I'm running Simply in a VM while I try to switch over to a linux based package but it would be so much easier if it ran under wine. Simply does have some flaws but like you, nothing else serves my needs yet. Have you tried odoo / openerp? It looks like a pretty good solution to me. I'm trying to install tryton next but I do need full featured manufacturing and payroll apps, if you don't there are solutions out there, even if you just search "accounting" in ubuntu/debian repos. Frontaccounting wasn't bad but lacked units of measure functionality that I wanted.

I have found another reason to be unhappy with Simply Accounting. I was recently given a tower with Windows 7 installed, and decided to install SA (chiefly as another way of backing up my data). The installation went smoothly—but it then refuse to open my back-ups, saying a data file was missing!

Looking on-line, this does not seem to be a rare problem, so I guess I was living in a fool's paradise with all my back-ups. All of which is to say, there are no perfect answers.

I have never tried a web-based program feeling that my work schedule can be erratic, an my internet connection can be erratic, so who needs the complications(but probably mostly because I am a stick in the mud).

Gnucash should be what I want: a barebones program with double-entry. Unfortunately, I ran one account on it last year, and when I attempted my year-end report, everything seemed to have gone pear-shaped. Fortunately it was a small account, and I simply rewrote all the rough data to a spreadsheet.

It may not have all been Gnucash's fault (I have been known to make mistakes) but I found it alarming that things had been able to drift askew for so long without me realizing it. Clearly most or all the difficulties were related to split entries—one of these days I'll go back and try to understand what went wrong, and then I may install a later version and try again.

I might try to install SA with Wine, but it would, I think, be for interest's sake: given that I can make mistakes, programs can make mistakes, hardware can hiccup, I am suspicious of adding another layer to the process. . .

Hate to ask the obvious, did you try to copy the file and folder where your data was located to a new machine/installation, that worked for me before when I couldn't get a backup towork. Even when I install SA in A VirtualBox of Windows XP, it has issues restoring backups so I advise be very careful with it. People who use the linux version of the database connector on their servers have trouble connecting to the database, I tried running SimplyAccountingConnectionManager.exe under wine and then following and fixing the dlls. Too much effort but if you look under help/about (or somewhere near there) in your SA install it lists a whole bunch of dlls used by SA. I haven't got a chance to look at the list since I printed it though, just too busy. I also thought of using centos and installing the SA rpm then using wine to make the client connect to the database but haven't had the time. Look in your repos, FrontAccounting, Postbooks and others are there and they are had drive installs not internet, Odoo you can choose to have your database on your own server or use theirs. Odoo also has a windows installer with a very straightforward setup so you can test it on your Win machine, then if you like it try the Linux version. Good luck man, really good luck!