Corrupted GNOME in user account

[eznet]

I am using RH8, and encountered a screensaver problem last night. I will not use screensavers anymore after I get the problem (below) fixed -- I promise. (Even tho they are quite cool.)

The system was totally stopped with the screensaver still on the screen when I came downstairs this morning.

I turned the machine off, then back on. When I log in as user, I get a bunch of little windows popping up with a red ball with a minus sign in it, and a green arrow button at the bottom. There is no text anywhere, and it looks like a Nautilus window opens up, too. Ximian Evolution starts up and works fine until I try to print, then it gets a "fatal error" of some sort.

If I log in as root, I don't get this problem.

Can I "rebuild" my GNOME desktop in the user account? How would I do it? [I've searched through the forums here and found one suggestion to delete all the .gnome* files by using some program called Midnite Commander, but typing "mc" in terminal returns "mc: not found". I also have consulted my RH Bible, and don't see anything there that helps me.]

A related question: if I understand the structure of Linux, the desktop "module" (please excuse me if I goof up the terminology -- I'm still learning) is independent of my data files, so I won't lose anything I've created or saved (like OpenOffice files) -- am I correct?

Thanks,
eznet

[demian]

You can just delete the user's gnome files with rm -r ~/.gnome*. The tilde (~) is a shortcut for the user's home directory. So do make sure that you are not logged in as root. Otherwise you will delete root's gnome files. (But you shouldn't be using gnome as root user anyway but that's a different story.)

This will delete all the configuration you did to your user's gnome desktop and they will be reverted back to the defaults the next time you start gnome. User data like documents you created and the such will, of course, be untouched.

[eznet]

Thanks for the tip.

I tried it, but it didn't work. I still get the little windows with the ball and the minus sign. I tried it a couple times.

eznet

[eznet]

For kicks, I decided to try and log in using the KDE desktop instead of GNOME. That worked, but I got the following error message a couple seconds after the desktop came up:

"An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for rhn-applet. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly."

There was a "details" button, so I clicked that and got:

"Adding client to server's list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0"

I don't know if this is related, but thought I'd mention it.

eznet