Errors: Not Writeable, file protocol died unexpectedly. System rendered near useless.

[enginemusic]

Recently began getting strange errors.

1: Whenever I try to open almost any program, I get the error

Configuration file "/home/haplesskdeuser/.kde/share/config/amarokrc" not writable.
Please contact your system administrator.

2: Dolphin cannot browse. At all. Gives error "The process for the file protocol died unexpectedly". This error also pops up any time I try to use any save dialog.

3: This one's happened before on both this system (12.04) and 11.10 (and, I think on 11.04). I'd post a screen shot but cannot save
I've answered both Yes and No to it, and it still comes back. I am not plugging or unplugging devices to the computer when it happens. Let me know if I should split this one into another thread, but it's popped up twice in two days so I'm including it in case it's tied to the above.

Removed Sound Devices
KDE detected that one or more internal devices were removed.
Do you want KDE to permanently forget about these devices

Capture: Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server
Output: HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 (Direct hardware device without any conversions)
Output: HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 (Direct sample mixing device)
Output: HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 (HDMI Audio Output)
Output: HDA NVidia, HDMI 0 (Hardware device with all software conversions)
Output: Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server

At the moment, the computer is useless for all but playing mp3 and browsing, and I can't even save funny cat pictures. Wondering if 1 and 2 could be tied to failing HD. Halp.

[Snowhog]

Almost certain that before this happened, you launched a GUI application from the console using sudo instead of kdesudo, and then made changes to files within your home directory. This has the result of changing files in your users /home directory to root.

Open a console. Verify you are in your user /home directory and then type:

sudo chown -R user:user *

Where 'user' is your username you sign in with.

This will change any file in your home directory that is owned by root back to yourself.

[enginemusic]

Yup, that took care of the worst of it. I had used a chown command the other day for something unrelated (external media), somehow this affected everything. I think the offending command was
chown -R $(whoami) /media/backupmain

Now to try retrieving updates, that's been erroring for the last few attempts.

Thanks!

Will repost audio issue in different thread if it persists.