Very mystifying... the vast majority of your account settings are stored under those three folders.
Please run:

Code: Select all

ls -a | grep -E "^\."

It sounds very strange to me too actually.
Here's the output of your command:

Code: Select all

adobe
.android
.asadminpass
.aspell.en.prepl
.aspell.en.pws
.bash_history
.bash_logout
.bash_profile
.bashrc
.cache
.config
.dbus
.dia
.directory
.distcc
.dmrc
.dropbox
.dropbox-dist
.dropbox-dist-new
.dvdcss
.eclipse
.face.icon
.FBReader
.filezilla
.fontconfig
.fonts.conf
.fprint
.gconf
.gconfd
.gegl-0.0
.gimp-2.6
.gimp-2.7
.gnome2
.gnome2_private
.gnupg
.google
.gsopcast
.gstreamer-0.10
.gtk-bookmarks
.gtkrc-2.0
.gtkrc-2.0-kde4
.hamachi
.hplip
.htoprc
.ICEauthority
.icedtea
.irssi
.java
.kde
.kde4
.kderc
.kdevduchain
.kismet
.lesshst
.lo3
.local
.lyx
.m2
.macromedia
.mozilla
.mplayer
.mysql_history
.nautilus
.netkit
.nv
.nvidia-settings-rc
.ooo3
.pki
.putty
.qsopcast
.qt
.qt-recordmydesktop
.recently-used
.sane
.serverauth.4558
.Skype
.ssh
.subversion
.swt
.thumbnails
.tor
.TrueCrypt
.unison
.updatetool
.vidalia
.viminfo
.vimrc
.VirtualBox
.vnc
.wicd
.wireshark
.Xauthority
.xchat2
.xine
.xinitrc
.xournal
.xsession-errors

As far as I can tell, all of those are innocent I am afraid.
Have you tried creating a new user and copying over your ~/.kde*, ~/.config/ and ~/.local/ folders to that new user?
You probably want to include ~/.mozilla/ as well if you use Firefox.

bcooksley wrote:As far as I can tell, all of those are innocent I am afraid.
Have you tried creating a new user and copying over your ~/.kde*, ~/.config/ and ~/.local/ folders to that new user?
You probably want to include ~/.mozilla/ as well if you use Firefox.

No, I haven't tried yet. As regard Firefox, no problem I'm not using it anymore, as well as for other applications that left their .* dir within my home dir.

OK, I've copied the dirs you've said from my current account to the new test user and the monitor icon is shown when Fn+brightness[UP/DOWN] is pressed.
This is actually what I still see on the test account after copying such dirs over there:


bye

Very interesting. I would recommend continuing to use the new user at this point, assuming all your applications are working properly - something is definitely quite weird with your old user which is breaking this.

It's actually very strange. Who knows what the culprit is then?

My best guess would be either some unusual system wide file permission or group membership problem (highly unlikely), or that one of the other hidden directories is somehow relevant.

So you mean it is almost impossible to find out what is the "breaking" file or directory?

The first thing to do would be to compare the group membership of the two users. If they are the same, it is very, very unlikely to be a file permission problem. The next thing to do would be to go through each of the hidden (.*) directories in ~/ under your old user, moving them out of the way one by one, then logging out and back in again between each move.

You should also erase /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/ after logging out to ensure the broken icon is not cached.

Once the icon returns to normal, you know which directory contains the broken icon. If none of them do, consider the hidden files as well...

OK, the group membership is quite the same. By the way, I would use the new account but every time I login into the test account it asks for passwords (I'm not investigating why now) and it seems to be a mess).

So we have seen that it is not a permission problem, since this time I created the new test user with the same group membership.

Well, I'm going to try every hidden directory, once at time. I will let you know as soon as possible. Thank you.

Hey,

something really strange happened.
I've copied the ~/.adobe directory to the test home user and I could reproduce the problem. Cought it at the first shot.
The problem is that even if I remove the /home/test/.adobe directory, the icon monitor still doesn't come back, even deleting /var/tmp/kdecache-test/*. I really don't understand now.

At this point, I immediately created a new test user (same membership) again and copied only these directories:

Code: Select all

cp -a .kde* ../test1/
cp -a .config/ ../test1/
cp -a .local/ ../test1/

The monitor icon is not showing even with the new test user!!!
What's going on?

Very unusual. It seems that the Adobe Flash plugin is somehow mangling the icons configuration.
I do not know why this would occur, it seems completely non-sensical.

OK, I've done one more test. Created a new test user account with the same group membership of my user and the monitor icon is not shown!
This is very strange. Now this problem seems to be system wide now! How is it possible? It seems that this behaviour begun when I copied the .adobe directory from my user home directory to the test user home directory. I don't think I've done something affecting also the whole system only copying that directory!

Please perform a permissions check across the entire of /usr/share/icons/.