hi guys, i am using pclinuxos 2010 kde, whenever i try to install a software using synaptic, it makes my system corrupt.

just a hour ago, i installed "kmplayer",synaptic asked me to update some "components" to which i clicked yes and it installed ok, but when i restarted my computer,there is an error on my desktop which says:

[error]
Could not start process Unable to create io-slave:klauncher said:error loading 'kio_desktop'
[/error]

the same error message appears in dolphin status bar as well and you cannot see any files or folder.konqueror doesn't even start.

Although i installed kmplayer as an normal user,now i am logged in as root but the same error is here as well.

This has happened many times and every time to get my desktop back, i had to "repair install" my pclinuxos (meaning that when installer asked me to format the destination partition, i chose not to).I have tried this with many softwares like chromimum,kadmintools,amarok,midori etc.

When i "repair install" my pclinuxos,those software that doesn't require updated system files still work.

Please help me, thanks in advence.

I use PCLinuxOS-2010 and had the same problem about a month ago. Did a lot of googling and found a number of sites with different suggestions and tried some without success. There were a number of reasons given as to why this could happen and I don't really know what the cause was. Similar to your situation, I tried to install a program called kalarm which led to the corruption. One thing I noticed is that before this problem occurred, in Synaptic I would have a different version for Installed and Latest version.

I'm guessing that the problem lies in updating dependencies for whatever program we may be installing. I have a vague recollection of getting some warning message after trying to install kalarm when Synaptic finished but don't remember what they were.

When I got this message on the Desktop, I did have some icons in the taskbar including the Synaptic icon. What I finally did was open Synaptic, click Mark All Upgrade, Apply and let it run. It ran for about an hour and when it finished everything was updated and I could boot and use everything. It did install a new version of KDE and now all my programs in Synaptic show the same Installed/Latest version.

You might try waiting for another response or googling the specific error as this is a pretty drastic measure. You might find that some other simpler suggestion will work for you which didn't work for me.