I have no idea how I caused this. When the desktop (KDE 4) comes up near the end of bootup, 4 instances of Firefox and an instance of kate (the text editor) try to start and I get 4 popups saying like "another Firefox is already running" and none of the 4 actually starts. For kate there is no popup, just a kate icon in the task bar along with the 4 Firefox icons. I click OK on the 4 Firefox related popups and they disappear along with the 4 Firefox icons in the taskbar. The kate instance doesn't produce any error messages/popups, it just dies on its own before kate actually opens an editor window. I've noticed that apps I leave running when I shutdown Kubuntu autostart with the next boot. I have never shutdown the OS with Firefox or kate running so I am surprised they autostart now when I boot. I do always leave a terminal running when I shutdown and that still autostarts and works normally (typing in it is fast and commands that don't launch a GUI run at normal speed).
Using the GUI is another story. If I click on the app launcher it takes about 2 minutes for the menu to appear, another 2 minutes to make a selection and I've waited for 30 minutes for a selected app to start but it doesn't start.
In top I don't see any processes taking large amounts of CPU time or RAM. I see the plasma-desktop process taking 2% CPU constantly which I don't think is normal, it uses less than 1 MB RAM. There is about the usual amount of disk activity. I am not starting any daemons other than regular system daemons and not starting any other apps in a startup script. What do I do to fix this problem?
Thinking the problem is just with my own desktop environment, I created another user (the only other user besides me and root) thinking I would try to login as that user to see if he has the same problem. Unfortunately when I installed Kubuntu I specified to log me in automatically at boot time so I don't get a login prompt at boot time. From my own account I have tried logging out from the app launcher but it doesn't log out (or I haven't waited long enough but it seems if it won't do it in 30 minutes then it won't do it). I have also tried sudo init X with X = 2 to 5 but that doesn't do anything. I can init to runlevel 1 or 6 but that's all. So how do I configure it to give a login prompt at boot time or better yet how do I fix the underlying problem described above?
Using the GUI is another story. If I click on the app launcher it takes about 2 minutes for the menu to appear, another 2 minutes to make a selection and I've waited for 30 minutes for a selected app to start but it doesn't start.
In top I don't see any processes taking large amounts of CPU time or RAM. I see the plasma-desktop process taking 2% CPU constantly which I don't think is normal, it uses less than 1 MB RAM. There is about the usual amount of disk activity. I am not starting any daemons other than regular system daemons and not starting any other apps in a startup script. What do I do to fix this problem?
Thinking the problem is just with my own desktop environment, I created another user (the only other user besides me and root) thinking I would try to login as that user to see if he has the same problem. Unfortunately when I installed Kubuntu I specified to log me in automatically at boot time so I don't get a login prompt at boot time. From my own account I have tried logging out from the app launcher but it doesn't log out (or I haven't waited long enough but it seems if it won't do it in 30 minutes then it won't do it). I have also tried sudo init X with X = 2 to 5 but that doesn't do anything. I can init to runlevel 1 or 6 but that's all. So how do I configure it to give a login prompt at boot time or better yet how do I fix the underlying problem described above?
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