DCOP, artsd crashing, how to troubleshoot?

[mjinks-kde at wicked.uchicago.edu]

Greetings.  KDE newbie here, asking lots of open-ended questions.

I have a user on a Debian 3.0 machine (KDE 2.2.2) who is having a number
of problems which might or might not be related.  Two presented here.

The first issue we noticed was that when he logs in, the CPU load goes
sky-high and we get a popup saying that the sound daemon has exceeded
CPU limits and will be shut down.  This also happens when I log in to
the machine using my own account.  Other sound programs work fine (I've
tested "play", RealPlayer, and the GNOME sound daemon, all with no
issues).

His sound card is an Intel i810 built in to the motherboard of a new
Dell OptiPlex in case that helps; from dmesg:

Intel 810 + AC97 Audio, version 0.04, 09:47:22 Nov 28 2001
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1f.5 to 64
i810: Intel ICH2 found at IO 0xcc40 and 0xc800, IRQ 17
i810_audio: Audio Controller supports 6 channels.
ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: 0x4144:0x5360 (Analog Devices AD1885)
i810_audio: AC'97 codec 0 Unable to map surround DAC's (or DAC's not
present), total channels = 2
i810_audio: setting clocking to 41201

The other KDE-related problem that he's having is that DCOP will
apparently crash occasionally; I'm not yet sure whether this happens
mid-session, or if he sometimes logs out and it doesn't clean up after
itself.  At any rate, when the problem comes up, he can't open new
terminals or do much of anything KDE-related.  The only workaround we've
found is to switch to a virtual term and remove his .DCOPserver*
directories; then he can log in and everything is fine.

For both of these issues, I simply have no idea how to produce decent
debugging information.  I've never lived on KDE myself so I'm unfamiliar
with its layout and its quirks.  How should I investigate these issues?
Where to RTFM?  Or, are these known problems?  A quick search of the
mailing list archives didn't turn up anything.

Thanks,
-mrj

-- 
# Michael Jinks, IB # JFI/MRSEC/EFI Computing # University of Chicago #
      Reader!  Think not that
      technical information
      ought not be called speech;  -- Anonymous, "How to decrypt a DVD"
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