I don't have any application shortcut that directly points towards the network drive as far as I know. I do have a shell script shortcut for backup on my NAS drive, but this script is in my home directory and run into this local directory. Yet, I noticed that a few recent documents in the <recently used> tab are documents stored on my NAS, e.g. videos on my NAS which I watched recently. I cannot clear the recent documents, and even if I would do, there will be new ones coming in. It was already so with KDE 4.5 and I did not have the K Launcher freezing. So I think that some piece of code has changed in K Launcher causing this regression. What's your opinion? Should I open a bug, or do I have to investigate this issue further?

It could be possible that KLauncher, or components attached to KLauncher attempt to get information concerning the Recent Documents. You can disable the Recent Documents functionality by disabling write permission to ~/.kde4/share/apps/RecentDocuments/ after removing all files from it.

Code: Select all

rm -f ~/.kde4/share/apps/RecentDocuments/*
chmod 000 ~/.kde4/share/apps/RecentDocuments/

@bcooksley: Thanks for your suggestion, but I would like to keep on using the "Recent Documents" tab in K Launcher. So I think I'm going to open a bug for this issue as this problem did not happen with previous versions of KDE (4.5.x).

FYI, I have open bug 269758 for this issue in KDE bugs tracking system (bugs.kde.org).

Kubuntu 10.10 with backports to 4.6.2

I've had the problem of the standard launcher freezing throughout 4.6.x. I've not encountered this in earlier KDE 4 versions. I also don't have any problem using either Lancelot (which I find too busy) or the traditional KDE 3.x-styled launcher (which I find too ugly). I'm using Lancelot at the moment, but I'd much prefer to return to the original launcher.

Once the launcher freezes, all of plasma does so as well. The panel and the desktop become as unresponsive as the menu. It's rather difficult to identify when the menu will freeze. Today it happened with only a Konsole open on my desktop. I could bring up the launcher but could not click on any icons. Alt-F4 still allowed me to select the terminal window, and I could launch applications from the prompt. However the menu stayed on-screen throughout and could not be forced behind the open applications.

As for the other quesions asked here....
I have no external drive shortcuts. I mount an external USB drive and an NFS share at boot. These are both owned by root, not me. I'm running a quad-core machine that rarely has a load average above one. At the moment, with Firefox and Konsole open, my load average is about 0.05-0.10.

I posted this to the bug report that anderlia opened as well.

If you can, try attaching a debugger to Plasma in Konsole once it freezes and generate a backtrace. You will need debugging symbols installed for Plasma, Qt and kdelibs.