All KDE apps crash : So called solution

[Guillaume CABUZEL]

Hi,
I'm the guy from a Japanese company evaluating KDE from a desktop OS 
replacement. We had a trouble with a user changing his KDE theme from 
BlueCurve to Crystal, to move back to BlueCurve five minutes later (all 
operations having been executed through the KDE config panel).
This user could not launch any KDE applications (Konqueror, Quanta, 
KDEvelop, Kontact or whatever begin with a K...)
The "base" KDE was still running fine
And all the non KDE applications were still running fine (Gedit, XPDF, 
the Gimp or Nautilus)

We tried to upgrade KDE to the latest version 3.3.? for our OS (Fedora 
Core 2), it did not solved the problem.

The symptoms were like a memory leak. Whenever a KDE application was 
launched, it started, eating up all memory, then eating the swap and 
finally blocking the computer.

Thanks to your community : We so called "solved" the "problem": Removing 
the user, creating a new one, and suppressing the possibility of a theme 
change.
(so called resolving in a quick way, no time to do subtle, since we are 
in evaluation of Linux, time to resolve a problem is directly considered 
as a flaw of the OS by PHBs, and they are right to think this way, I do 
the same)
I would like to thanks the two guys who have helped, indicating the 
"memory leak" nature of the problem, and indication the "poisonnous" 
nature of the BlueCurve theme. Even if I use linux for more than five 
years now (mostly server side) it was the first time to ask to the 
community something. I appreciate your help.

More rewarding, this "blocking problem" could have been fatal to my 
pilot project of switching from Microsoft to Linux on the desktop. All 
the microsoft zealots (aka Microserfs and various PHBs) have claimed 
Linux unstable and unfit for the company as a consequence of this 
trouble, providing demonstration of the flaw to all their collegues, to 
try to prevent the pilot project to suceed. They are not important, the 
important people to convince are the passive, those who don't really 
care (i.e. 90% of the employees). These people have been positively 
pleased that we could get almost instant access to front line help at no 
cost. This does not means that we won't pay in the future for a support 
package from some company, but that indeed mean that we wont spoil our 
costly hours of support on trivial problem (aka a theme change...). 
Thanks one more time to your community to help me spin it in the favor 
of Linux.

On the minus side I don't understand how a Theme change can break that 
badly KDE applications (memory leak from a Theme ??? how can this even 
happen ???, a theme are images and fonts no ???). I do not have time to 
investigate, and have choosen to deflect the blame on RedHat, rather 
than KDE. It is for me easier to replace a distro (Mandrake or Suse will 
fit the bill) rather than replace all KDE apps selected for the "default 
desktop" with alternatives (if they exist !). But question : since all 
the changes have been done through the KDE admin panel, why the software 
did not check the theme (BlueCurve) detect its "poisonnous" nature, and 
prevent the change ???

Well, thanks one more time, as a whole. I know I speak to much, but you 
know I'm french, I can't help.

Guillaume CABUZEL
Da Vinci Co. Ltd.
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