This morning I opened my Kmail application and was greeted by the machine
spawning literally hundreds of copies of the Kmail composer window. Each
iteration opens with the same title, that of a message I sent yesterday.
The only way to kill it is to wait until it sucks down so much RAM that it
slows enough to type "killall kmail" or do the same from another tty.
Thinking that one of my kmail or gnome desktop configs got munged, I did
the following experiments:
1) renamed the directories ~/Mail/ and ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail, and the
files ~/.kde/share/config/{kmailcvt2rc,kmail.eventsrc,kmailrc} to
something innocuous, thus forcing kmail to rebuild a fresh copy of each on
startup. This time, instead of getting full-screen windows of the
composer (the size the kmail usually opens in) I get smaller sized
versions (the size the composer window usually opens in). But the results
are the same -- I get spawns of as many windows as RAM and SWAP allows or
until I can get enough control of the beast to kill it (whichever comes
first)!
2) created a new user and ran kmail -- no problem.
3) copied my kmail config files from the old user to the new, changed
ownership to the new user and then opened kmail. No problem and my
account settings moved with me.
4) opened a term and did 'su -' to the old user while logged on as the
new. Ran kmail from the term and it started spawning windows again.
5) While logged on as the new user I "su -" to the old and moved all
directories beginning with .gnome. Next, I logged on as the old user and,
as expected, my toolbar customizations were gone. Opened kmail and has
the same problem as before.
6) Did an init 1 and cleaned out the /tmp directory, thus removing all
vestages of kmail sockets and such. Once back into runlevel 5 I logged in
with but had the same problem.
My questions are: Can anyone point me to places I have missed where I can
look for corruption? Any other suggestions on how to get this total
aggravation fixed? I can't tell if the problem is with kmail per se or
whether my desktop environment is trying to helpfully restore settings
from a previous setting.
TIA,
Barry
