crashing apps

[Brian J. Tarricone]

remember a week or 2 ago when i mentioned that some apps being launched 
by the xfdesktop menu were immediately segfaulting?  danny followed up, 
saying that even with a mini test program using xfce_exec(), he could 
reproduce the crashing, or he sometimes ended up with apps hanging.  
i've talked to a couple people in #xfce with one or both problems.

in moving all the menu code into a gmodule, i rewrote large portions of 
it (iirc, the only thing left that i didn't touch is the menuspec 
stuff).  the crashes are still there.  edscott mentioned using electric 
fence to try to catch any possible illegal memory references, but it 
didn't come up with anything.

here's the weird part.  for me, the only two apps that crash (so far) 
from the menu are gedit and gnome-terminal. _but_, they only crash 
sometimes.  if i have a gnome-terminal or gedit window already open 
(launched from eterm or the panel), and i try to run either from the 
menu, they load fine.  this somewhat makes sense, since i believe both 
of them first check for running instances and have the already-running 
instance spawn another window.  now the odd thing.  if gedit is open, 
and i run gnome-terminal from the menu, gnome-terminal runs 
successfully.  (the reverse also works.)  this is really bizarre.

mantaz (from #xfce) said he's seeing danny's problem of apps hanging 
without starting...  this doesn't appear to be just xfdesktop either.  
jimmiejaz said gaim crashes if he runs it from the panel, but not from a 
terminal.

the one constant (so far) seems to be that running things from xfrun4 
works fine.

i'm not sure what to do.  i'm tempted to just ignore it for the time 
being, in the hopes that it will magically fix itself when something 
else gets fixed/changes.  but it really bothers me...

    -brian