My 6.2 file manager is spawning out of control after logging in. I was in the process of making 5 systems the same and the last few steps I performed was:

- Setup the systems as LDAP clients for my authentication method.

- Use gconf-editor to set some mandatory banners, screensaver stuff,
home dir as the default login location (vice the Desktop),
cutoff switch user buttons, plus a few other things.

- I then tar'ed up /etc/gconf and scp'ed that to the other four systems so they would all have the same default/mandatory settings.
Normally I just do the mandatory and the default directory only (a RHEL step I've done before). This time I forgot and did them all.

At this point I logged out so I could see that the banner was displaying correctly, that switch user was off and such.

After logging back the file manager was spawning out of control in the bottom panel bar. I did get a pop-up about a signal being trapped. This happens even with the root login.

I managed to get that error dialogue open and it pointed to /usr/bin/nautilus.

I logged in via a tty and renamed nautilus to nautilus.orig and was able to login without any file manager spawning.
Of course I lost a few other bells and whistles without that binary i.e. such as no right-click menu, etc.

I quickly setup a YUM repo on another system and then I did a yum reinstall of nautilus and also of Gconf2, but to no avail.

I cleaned out my home account of all dotfiles just incase it was something in my home account.

Any ideas on what the cause might be? Any diagnostic ideas would be helpful.

This is my first use of CentOS and everything was going so well.

Welcome to the CentOS fora. Please see the recommended reading for new users linked in my signature.

Quote:
Not quite sure what you have changed based on that description, nor what "did them all" means, but it clearly seems like a case of "If you break it you get to keep all the pieces." Things should work the same on CentOS as RHEL. If you don't have a backup of the stuff you clobbered, presumably in /etc, then a fresh install on at least one system (perhaps using kickstart for uniformity) should help you get back to a state approximating before having done them all. Restoring the state from the freshly installed system may rectify the error. Otherwise it looks like fresh installs all around may be in order.

If you need more help please provide more explicit information.