I'm not sure when this started, but I don't like short screen savers. I usually either disable them outright or put lengthy delays on them (at least an hour or more)...

Somewhere along the line, my screensaver has reset to a miniscule period and so I go to reset it.

On the System > preferences > screensaver tab I am met with an error dialog box: Could not launch menu item: Failed to execute child process "xscreensaver-demo" (No such file or directory)

Any ideas on how to 'fix' this?

edit: by the way, I have edited the menu item to explicitly run the xscreensaver-demo with the correct path in place, and the error still persists

What happens when you try to launch it manually?

$ whereis xscreensaver-demo
$ /path/to/xscreensaver-demo

whereis mustn't be a part of indiana, but I know it's located in /usr/X11/bin/

If I start it normally, it works.

If I start the daemon (which I assume is just xscreensaver) then it now runs as well (it wasn't running before). Now if I do it again it tells me the daemon is running on display 0.

Just for the hell of it, I restarted my X session (ctrl+alt+backspace) the daemon still isn't running (which is what I expect since I have disabled it - in the -demo screen)...

But the link in the menu still does not work. starting it form the command line does though... AND it IS in my path, so I don't need to do the path/to ...

confusing

It seems you system is very low on virtual memory according to that message (Failed to execute child process) and the other posting where you complain about a broken desktop.

is that as a result of insufficient swap file size? or space? I have 1GB Ram in this machine

Insufficient swap area. You can increase the virtual memory space with a couple of commands.

mkfile 1g /somewhere/1g
swap -a /somewhere/1g

Add the file in /etc/vfstab for the change to persist.

Parhaps are you creating big files in /tmp ?