After a unscheduled power cycle (the electricity went out), KDE 4.2.4 is extremely slow to start up. It takes upwards of twenty minutes for it to finally complete whatever the hell it's doing and show the desktop. Even worse, the entire desktop is crippled with any program which uses the KDE libraries taking five to twenty minutes to load and show. Interestingly, any program which doesn't use the KDE libraries only takes seconds, including those that use QT; KTorrent, for instance, starts up immediately, but using the Open dialog within it takes minutes. Kopete, kwrite/kate/kedit, Dolphin, etc all take minutes to load.

Before the power outage, KDE loaded up in seconds and the various programs that

I have no clue what could be wrong here. I've tried deleting my .kde folder multiple times. It doesn't work. I'm running Linux 2.6.28.7.

Try running the following outside of a KDE Session:

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export KDEHOME=$(kde4-config --localprefix)
rm -rf $KDEHOME/tmp-*/*
rm -rf $KDEHOME/cache-*/*
rm -rf $KDEHOME/socket-*/*
rm $HOME/.config/Trolltech.conf

Afterwards, if not fixed, try running the following:

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kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

Thank you for the prompt response.

I did as you asked, but there was no change. I did get an error on running kbuildsycoca4, however. I don't know if it's relevant, but:

kbuildsycoca4(17268) KConfigGroup::readXdgListEntry: List entry MimeType in ".hidden/knewstickerstub.desktop" is not compliant with XDG standard (missing trailing semicolon).

Can you reproduce under a new user?

bcooksley wrote:Can you reproduce under a new user?

Yes, the same thing happens under a new user.

Please verify that your system installation and configuration is correct, through your distributions utilities.

bcooksley wrote:Please verify that your system installation and configuration is correct, through your distributions utilities.

Yes, everything is correct.

Is there a log hidden somewhere which might give more information?

Just wondering, do you use ext4? It sounds like some system file(s) is/are broken. Did you happen to edit a file when the electricity went out?

Maybe you could try to start a KDE application from terminal (e.g. run 'dolphin' from Konsole) and see what takes so long.

Hans wrote:Just wondering, do you use ext4? It sounds like some system file(s) is/are broken. Did you happen to edit a file when the electricity went out?

Nope, EXT3. And I wasn't editing anything when the electricity went out, though I did have some torrents going in the background. I did a fsck on the partition in question (the drive where I keep such things is entirely separate from the system partition to the point of being on a different device) and no errors were detected, so I didn't think anything was damaged. I also later fscked the system partition using a LiveCD later when KDE started acting up. Again, no errors found.

Maybe you could try to start a KDE application from terminal (e.g. run 'dolphin' from Konsole) and see what takes so long.

I have done this for both Dolphin and KWrite, and there is no error message given on startup for either. It takes just as long as when initiating the program through the icon.

I did find something which seemed to have the same symptoms, but gave an error something like:

<unknown program name>(19796)/: Communication problem with "dolphin" , it probably crashed.
Error message was: "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or thenetwork connection was broken." "

But, again, I didn't get anything like that error message. I still did the recommended solution and deleted my ~/.kde directory on the off chance that it was something related, but that failed to help.

Please try running a KDE application under a process that can trace what the application is currently doing ( ptrace I think... )

Okay, I've managed to do this, and Kwrite seems to hang on the following call:

connect(11, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(111), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1")}, 16

KTorrent is a normal KDE application... so therefore it doesn't affect D-Bus.

During startup, a list of services being "started" should scroll by ( you may need to hit Esc to see it ). Do any fail?