Gnome3 is unusable after system crash

[nexxuz]

I am running F16 using Gnome-Shell on my laptop and when it overheated and shutoff. After repairing the overheating issue I have been unsuccessful with using Gnome-Shell at all. It will let me login and the mouse moves but I get no usability at all. I was able to install IceWM via console and it works perfectly fine. After researching how to reset Gnome3 it said to move/remove the following folders/files:
.gnome/*
.gnome3/*
.gconf/*
.gconfd/*
.metacity/*
.local/dconf/user

That did nothing for me.

I tried to setup a new user but the problem persists even with a fresh account.

I have even tried reinstalling the gnome-shell package via yumex.

I am at a loss what to do now... please help!

[jpollard]

Is it possible that the heat damaged part of the video processing? There should be some kind of error reported over the failure, either hardware or software.

[nexxuz]

I would think that too but I had this happened on a friends laptop a few weeks ago also. Since I was feeling lazy and my friend was alright with it, we reinstalled F16, we kept the /home intact so it would not delete any of his files but has been working fine on that other PC ever since. This seems like there is a global Gnome setting that may need resetting but I do not know of any such setting.

[szilagyic]

There's really no need to reinstall the entire OS. At a minimum, looking and removing .gnome* folders in the /home directory for the user should at least revert everything back to the defaults for Gnome as it will rebuild the directories and files that it needs. There may be other folders as well (I'm not 100% on Gnome 3). Or, renaming the /home/user folder and creating an empty folder to rebuild it from scratch, which is overkill.

[nexxuz]

Sorry but I already tried creating a whole new user and the problem persisted... that's why I am thinking that it is some global Gnome3 setting.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by nexxuz

.gnome/*
.gnome3/*
.gconf/*
.gconfd/*
.metacity/*
.local/dconf/user

Add .config/{dconf,gnome}* and .gnome2*.

---------- Post added at 11:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:51 PM ----------

Originally Posted by nexxuz

Sorry but I already tried creating a whole new user and the problem persisted... that's why I am thinking that it is some global Gnome3 setting.

Sorry forget what I just posted then.

What video hardware and driver are you using? Is there anything in /var/log/messages or /var/log/boot.log relating to video, or ~/.xsession-errors after a failed login?

[nexxuz]

Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8200M
Driver: kmod-nvidia-3.2.9-1.fc16.i686-290.10-1.fc16.17.i686

I have looked in /var/log/messages and there are no signs of failure
In /var/log/boot.log there is no signs of failure.

I did find something else out that is interesting... nautilus and totum both segfault when trying to launch.

I even tried reinstalling all applications listed in the "Gnome" group in yumex but that didn't work either.

There is a known prelink issue with the nvidia driver so try running.

su
prelink -au

[nexxuz]

You are awesome!!!

That did the trick! I will try to remember that if I ever hav this problem again.