Without warning, after a reboot yesterday there was a huge activity on my laptop CPU and LAN. Investigation showed that "migration" was taking place. Knowing that my IMAP server had many thousands of messages I left it alone for 18 hours, before stopping Akonadi and renaming the Akonadi directory.

I can run Akregator, KAddressBook and KOrganizer individually, but no matter what I do I can't start KMail. rpm -qa tells me that I have kdepim-4.4.11.1-4.fc14.i686 - so this whole thing is unexpected.

Since deleting the database has not cured the problem I investigated resources - there is no mail source set up apart from a local one (not sure whether that will get the /var/spool/mail messages?). I tried to add an IMAP resource - that gave me an icon which said that no server had been configured. Selecting Modify does nothing. Selecting Remove crashes Akonadi. The crash report is useless, and if I agree to add packages it opens a new konsole window, labelled sh, and asks for a password. Password to what?

Can anyone help me out of this mess?

After more than 30 hours, I'm finally back in business. I shut down completely, waited, and restarted. Previously I had only restarted. It's not satisfactory, as I will never know what the problem was, but at least everything is working now.

kdepim-4.4 doesn't even include the migrator. Could it be that you somehow got kdepim-runtime 4.6 installed?

Cheers,
_

No, it definitely isn't 4.6. It has been suggested that some glitch actually started the kaddressbook migrator, and that was what I saw. Possible, I guess. Whatever the cause, the fact that a cold boot cured the problem suggests that some sort of cacheing was going on, persisting across a restart. I've seen problems before where the same resolution was needed, both in Linux and in Windows.