[vox-tech] KDE? Or something more insidious....?

[Richard S. Crawford]

I came back from a week-long business trip in Santa Barbara to find that 
my RH7.2 box is acting kinda weird.  Normally, I leave it up and running 
when I'm gone, since I feel comfortable with my firewall setup* and so I 
can log in and move some files around in case I decide to work on a 
story while on the road.  When I came back, I logged into my computer to 
find the following...

1.  KDE is broken.  Or something.  In the taskbar, the icons for running 
programs no longer display the name of the program, if that makes sense.

2.  More seriously, I can't access anything from the KDE menu.  When I 
try clicking on the menu icon, KDE slows down glacially for several 
minutes before I can start using anything again.  And the menu never 
shows up.  The same thing happens if I try right-clicking on the desktop.

3.  Sometimes, KDE just freezes.  Kaput.  I'm used to this sort of thing 
from Windows, but my Linux box has been nice and stable ever since I 
replaced my hard drive.  But this morning I stepped away from my 
computer to get some breakfast, and came back to find that my 
screensaver was paused, and nothing I could do -- whether moving the 
mouse or clicking the mouse or typing on the keyboard -- could get 
things going again.

I'd love to upgrade to KDE 3.01 but haven't a clue how to go about doing 
that (I admit, I still consider myself a newbie); GNOME 2.0 is 
unreliable on my computer; and I'm not sure how to reinstall from my 
source disks without zarking LILO.

I can fix most of the problems on my computer without any serious issues 
(getting MySQL to play with PHP and Apache on my box was a challenge, 
but fun!) but X and window managers, while I like using them, have me 
flummoxed.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Richard


* For what it's worth, I've poked around on my system as much as I can 
and I can't find any evidence that my system was hacked into while I was 
gone; and that was the explanation I'd come up with for why my system 
started acting so weird while I was gone.  That, and hard drive issues. 
  Which is not a possibility I'm willing to entertain just yet if I can 
at all avoid it.