first yes I\'m a gentoo user. I\'m not going to give you a whole bunch of useless info however. infact. I already fixed the bug. amarok was taking over one minute to start. when someone on our forums told me they did a strace and found out that amarok was making a call to the loopback address. Iptables was blocking it. I still haven\'t figured out why you guys would have it call the loopback (net.lo or 127.0.0.1, for IPv4) but I think that if I run it from a terminal or gdb, and it hangs it should tell me to check the loopback... or it should be in the debug section of the wiki... and where ever else it needs to be. I think this cause my problems with KDE last spring. I have no idea yet why it would send packet\'s to the loopback... it shouldn\'t need TCP/IP at all to run. which means I shouldn\'t need net.lo at all. let alone worry about my firewall.