xfdesktop not loading or overrun by Gnome

[Marc Schwartz]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 10:49 -0500, Paul M. Bucalo wrote:
> Just recently I noticed one of my WBEL boxes running XFce 4.2 doing
> something strange and so far irreversible. I noticed that right after
> xfce-panel is loaded by the session manager, it loads up
> evolution-alarm-notify. Then the session background is replaced with the
> Gnome desktop with icons. If I kill the desktop background and run
> xfdesktop, I get my desktop sans right-click menu. It most likely is a
> Gnome problem, but I can't seem to figure out where to find the
> solution. I used the gconf editor to uncheck any references to nautilus
> controlling the desktop. I tried using KDM instead of GDM. I tried
> killing the Gnome desktop, starting up xfdesktop and then saving the
> session. Nothing works! Any ideas or suggestions?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Paul


More than likely you have some applications running that are conflicting
with xfdesktop in some fashion.

>From a console, run:

ps -e

and see what application processes are running.

If you note anything to do with nautilus, kill it.

Also, note that, as was mentioned in a recent thread, nautilus seems to
kill xfdesktop, so it is also likely that xfdesktop is not running and
therefore is not saved in a current session configuration.

Try:

xfdesktop&

from a console to see if that changes anything.

Also, note that (depending upon which version of Evolution you are
running), exiting Evolution does not exit all of the sub-applications.
The evolution-alarm-notify application enables Evo's calendar alarms to
still function, even if you exit the main application. Thus, if you exit
Evo and logout of your session, saving it, the evolution-alarm-notify
loads up at your next login.

If none of the above help, then one option, to restore a default
configuration, is to delete the files in ~/.cache/sessions. These are
the session files.

After deleting the above files, then logout of your current session and
do not save the session at the logout dialog. You can then login in to a
default session configuration and make further modifications as you
require.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz