For once I'll post an easy-to-answer question. I hope!

What does ICE stand for? I found a half dozen possibilities, but no clue as to what ICE means in the context such as /tmp/.ICE-unix or .ICEauthority.

Thanks.

Depends on who you ask:

ICE Illinois Computing Educators
ICE In-Car Entertainment
ICE In-Circuit Emulator Intel
ICE Innovations (in) Connectivity Exposition
ICE Insane Creator's Enterprises
ICE Instituto Costarricense (de) Electricidad
ICE InterCity Experimental another German train
ICE InterCity Express German train
ICE Interactive Collaborative Environment Sandia National Laboratories, USA
ICE Internal Combustion Engine
ICE International Cometary Explorer
ICE Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics
ICE Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics anti-cracking code first seen in William Gibson's Necromancer

hmm, according to http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ch/003517.html /tmp/.ICE-unix contains libICE sockets and according to http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LS...SB/libice.html ICE stands for Inter-Client Exchange as in ICE Protocol.

I hope that's good enough to win the fair day goose but I suspect you were already leaning towards one of the answers you'd found?

Woohoo! An answer!

Wasn't leaning in any direction! But I'll easily accept Inter-Client Exchange as the answer. That acronym seems the most likely.

Now a tougher question. No, this was not a sting operation with a false leading question! I'm still troubleshooting my box and the following error message appears often:

IO error opening ICE connection

Google was not my friend. I found snippets of code, but no context in which to guess my way through what kinds of events will lead to this message. This seems to be KDE related although I am uncertain. I'm hoping some of you code gurus can help provide some possibilities that might ring a bell in my situation.

My first SWAG (Scientific Wild A-- Guess) is that the error is related to KDE trying to communicate with my flaky CD drive. Is this the type of thing the ICE protocol handles? I don't know, but I'm Googling as I submit this message.

I use the KDE device icons to mount and unmount CDs and floppies. Just today I noticed that when I disable that icon from appearing on the desktop I then no longer see this particular error message. At least not this afternoon and I have not rebooted into X/KDE a sufficient number of times to be certain of the relationship. Besides the error message does not repeat with any consistency and might again appear tonight or tomorrow. One of those lovely intermittent problems that are so challenging to solve.

Any help here?

Have you tried blowing away /tmp and rebooting? Maybe a stale something or other causing the issue.

.ice is also a file compression format.

Yup! Been there done that. Many times--SOP (standard operating procedure)!

I've been restarting X/KDE quite a bit the past several hours and the error messsage hasn't returned (yet) since I stopped using the desktop device icons. I also did some light reading about DCOP and ICE (I'm no programmer) but seems I could be on the right track here as stated in my previous post. I'm guessing the problem was KDE trying to do some kind of initial hand shake with that flaky CD drive. The CD drive worked fine until a couple of weeks ago and possibly that is when all of these snake skins and spider webs starting appearing. Of course, I was not going to smell any cause-and-effect connection for a while---.

I also have not seen any X BadWindows messages for a few hours either. But I reverted to 6.8.2-3 earlier today several hours before I dumped the desktop device icons. I'll do a backup and then update to 6.8.2-4 and see if the errors return. And I think I'll unplug the flaky drive completely.

Looks like I need to shop for a new CD drive. Maybe the thing merely needs cleaning. Is that possible with these sealed contraptions?

Digging through the files on my hard disk only gives me a few hits (with my setup) on that error string:
/opt/kde/lib/libkdeinit_dcopserver.so
/usr/X11R6/bin/proxymngr
/usr/X11R6/bin/xsm

That only suggests some sort of IPC hiccup happened on your desktop, which you already know. Shilo's suggestion of blowing away /tmp sounds like a good one. If it was just a screwed up socket, re-creating it after a re-boot should cure it.

Wow! I took nearly 70 words to say "dunno"!

offtopic...
since it was brought up out-of-context. ICE is also "In Case of Emergency" which is what some ppl/authorities were asking ppl to put on their cell phones (or mobiles, depending on where u are) so that if u're found in various states of incapacity (read: injured, dead or unconscious) the ppl who find u will know what number to call.

i don't think too many ppl adopted it :P