On 19/09/12 00:32, Lisi wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 September 2012 15:20:19 Lisi wrote:
>> I had an apparently working system, so I decided to take a deep breath,
>> cross my fingers and install Sl�vek's patches.  All appeared to go
>> swimmingly.  But now if I try to launch almost anything via Klauncher I get
>> the message above.
>
> These applications won't launch from the menu either, thus redering the
> computer almost totally useless.


Have you tried launching them from the command line? Assuming you can get a
terminal to open. Try

KDE Menu > Run Command > xterm

Some six months ago or so, I had something go wrong with my KDE 3.5.4
installation where I could not launch any KDE or Gnome applications. Basic
XWindows apps would launch.

The cursor would change to the bouncing ball, bounce for a few seconds, then
nothing. There were no obvious errors either printed to std out at the
terminal, or logged. I didn't want to reboot, because I had some applications
already running and didn't want to risk ending up with nothing at all.

Eventually I fixed it by renaming or deleting the dot-files in my home
directory and letting them be recreated. I don't know which dot-file did the
trick, but I think it may have been font related. Start with your .kde and
.qt directories, then anything to do with fonts, and then work your way
through everything else. Purely shell-related dot-files like .bashrc can be
left alone.


-- 
Steven