nautilus hangs when restricted-manager crashes

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

> The only way to get my desktop work again is to restart gdm and log in again.
Are you saying that your desktop works every second time? After the Gnome desktop is loaded, does restricted-manager work?

I recently ran a standard update with the update manager (hadn't done so in maybe a month) and when I rebooted and tried to log in I had exactly this problem.

I *cannot* log into my account now no matter what I do -- it just hangs at "restricted-manager". Ps doesn't show a restricted-manager process for me at all, though.

However, an interesting caveat: I created a guest account from scratch from the console, and was able to log into that (in gdm!), so my system is not completely screwed, but something in the config of my real user account is causing the login process to hang at restricted-manager. (To be clear: I can log into guest every time; logging into my normal account hangs every time.)

Does anyone know a workaround for this?? If I hadn't thought to create the guest account (which really I didn't give high odds of working -- why should it??) I'd be dead in the water, and I'm sure this applies to others as well.

I'm running a 64-bit version, Feisty, with an nvidia 8800(?) card, for which I had to install the driver from the nvidia site because the standard driver with feisty was not working.
It's been running splendedly for months, until today...

If there's something I can do to help track it down, let me know. If there's a likely workaround in the meantime, please let me know. I am still effectively dead in the water because meaningfully syncing the guest account with my real account without absorbing the associated hang will likely be non-trivial. (And, anyway, I can't be the only one running into this -- this needs to be fixed; having a standard update kill a previously working machine is bad news.)

-Simon

Never mind. :) I managed to trace the behavior to a change in home directory location (was through a symlink, no longer is, and apparently this confused a few apps). How do I delete my comments here? :)

As far as I can remember, Restricted Manager did not work after I logged in successfully, can't reproduce it though, as I upgraded to gutsy beta, which works fine so far.

(FWIW, the above issue I described _is_ still a bug, just not likely related to this one; I don't know where I should submit it, but if someone here does it would be good to do so. Invoking the bug is simple: Just move your home directory to a new location. It's not something people do often, so is a fairly low priority bug, but nonetheless one should never be left unable to log in. The bug seems to be due to various(?) applications caching full paths, which become invalid when the home directory has moved. A symlink from the old to the new "fixes" the problem.)

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release, Hardy Heron? Thanks in advance.

Noting that the bug I ended up reporting is not the one associated with the head of this thread...

I'm too chicken to move my home directory again and see if it breaks everything, and don't have the time to clone or create a new account from scratch... but it should be pretty easy for anyone to try: just move your home dir from /home to /home2 and see what breaks. If you don't notice anything at all, then the bug is gone, and almost no time wasted...

-Simon

Moving/erasing the home directory starts Ubuntu with a fresh profile for most apps.

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

"Moving/erasing the home directory starts Ubuntu with a fresh profile for most apps."

Just to be clear:

# mv /home/guest /home2/guest
# vi /etc/passwd # (Change /home/guest to /home2/guest)

Login as Guest.

One would expect this to change nothing noteworthy from guest's perspective...
I just tried it and lost various configuration and prefs (which seems to imply you are correct, though I would consider that a bug!).

When I did this in the past with a more lived-in account (my personal account, not guest), I could no longer log in at all (see above). Have you tried it?

-Simon

The bug as originally stated has been closed. This new issue should be a new bug report, and filed against each program that breaks as it's likely to be separate issues specific to each broken program. Thanks again.