Got a bizarre problem on a Mandriva 2009 machine. On the desktop is a shortcut to ZSNES. When I try to execute the shortcut, the screen flashes the ZSNES interface briefly then cuts to a black screen. The only way to get out of the black screen seems to be killing XWindows altogether or toggling to a terminal.

On the other hand, if I start a terminal session and just run ZSNES from there it works fine.

I don't understand what's going on here. I've deleted the desktop shortcut and made new ones but the problem persists.

The shortcuts used to work just fine and no changes or anything have been made to the system since the last time it worked, software or hardware-wise. The system is up to date.

What gives?

Well I did some poking around and found that the problem was limited to a specific user, so it was probably some messed up configuration. I found the *.cfg files in the /home/user/.zsnes folder and deleted them and tried reopening zsnes and it worked fine.