Thanks for the reply, Nicolas. On Saturday 08 October 2011 23:04:18 Nicolas Bercher wrote: > Do you have parts of KDE4 installed? �Even if your situation seems more > serious than what it ought to be, I feel that these changes could come from > a bad mix of KDE3 and KDE4 programs. Do you use a pure Lenny install or do > you use other repositories such as testing, unstable, etc. ? Pure Lenny, except for a couple of Lenny-backports. > Silly questions: are you sure to log in as the expected user? Yes. I have it going straight to the desktop without going via logging in. > Did you do > some tricky things with uids, user accounts, /home directories, etc. ? I removed a large chunk of data from /home, but /home isn't on the dying disk. > �Does your ~/.kde folder seems ok, or quite empty/new/fresh. �Can you > recognize anything personnal in there? Yes. Some desktop backgrounds that I had imported. > (mostly in > ~/.kde/share/apps/<any_app_you_use_and_customised>/) > > Also, I have had bad adventures while I inadvertently modified /tmp perms: > > � �$ ls -ld /tmp > > must mention: "drwxrwxrwxt" and "root root". It does. > What's the problem with your CMOS battery? Nothing, I hope. But a dying CMOS battery can sometimes cause strange problems, and it is cheap (and usually easy) to change it. But there is no point in worrying about anything else while I know that the hard drive is flaky. There may well be something else the matter, but I shall be able better to see the wood for the trees by dealing with things one at a time and seeing whether each of them works, before carrying on. Lisi