SCIM makes everything crash!! -ubuntu 8.04
 

When SCIM is installed, on startup of regular GNOME the majority of applications crash or fail to start, including system-critical applications. Uninstalling SCIM fixes this, but then I don't have SCIM. Trying to manually run SCIM through terminal after reinstalling causes a "ccin_load_system_glossary error: No file or folder of that type" and scim crashes. Running applications with SCIM installed through terminal causes the same error. This occurs even when no plugin packages to SCIM are installed as well.

I have no idea why scim is crashing things for you, some kind of bug in the interface or one of the libraries or something I'd guess, but you can try using uim instead. It's another input method framework similar to scim. This page details your options.

Then how does one start uim? Neither im-switch -s uim-toolbar nor uim-systray caused anything to happen, yet they did not cause any errors. im-switch -l does show the current config to be uim though.

EDIT: Never mind, I got the toolbar to pop up, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything in it, and conversion doesn't work. I'll keep playing around...