This morning when booting my laptop I got the error message after login:

My laptop was working just fine yesterday and I did not install any software after that (certainly not automatix, which often gives this error).

I have tried to restart dbus, but everything is fine except for

The problem is the following: I CANNOT reinstall hal with synaptic, since I cannot go online. Somehow, my network card is not working, although I should have internet. USB drives and CDs are not automatically mounted, but at least manually seems to work.

I have no idea what to do now, as I really do NOT want to reinstall Ubuntu. Any ideas? Can I reinstall hal from cd or file? Would that help?

I managed to solve the problem by downloading the hal package from here. After that I manually re-installed it with the package manager, rebooted my computer and that's it. It works fine now. As if nothing ever happened.

I was wondering, was what causes this problem ever actually found? If so, maybe it would be worth actually posting something about WHY it happens or potential causes?!

I realise this thread isn't very lively and the problem has been solved, but it would be nice to know so that causing it can be prevented!!

(BTW I realise this is for Ubuntu and I'm on Debian Lenny, would the same idea but from debian.org work the same... ok, silly question!)