Sad computer with gnome: what to do ?

[Theodore Papadopoulo]

 Since several weeks, I get regularly thei Sad Computer icon which
tells me in disconnect and re-connect. But that does not work (and
that is true with every variants of gnome installed on my computer).
In the same situation KDE seems to work well even though that's not my
favorite setup.

All this seems to be related to switching between a configuration
where the laptop is docked and has two screens and a stadalone
configuration where the internal panel is the only screen. When I
first had the problem, I was unable to login, rebooted and then had
the trouble. With time, I learning that I could take a console, kill
the screensaver and then call the gnome-control-center to switch the
display, but this does not solve the problem completely as it still
happens sometimes after a while.

I have tried to remove my .gnome[-2] stuff and various other config
stuff such as monitors.xml. I have looked at the various log
(messages, Xorg, ... without any clue at the issue).

So I'm asking advice in how to analyse and cure definitely this problem.

Any idea ?

	Thank's

	Theo.

PS: Another stange behavior on my computer is that I often get a no
more processes situation in cases I have a relatively low number of
processes (~320). I strongly suspect chrome, but it is difficult to be
sure as the system information given by ps seems reasonnable.

I do not think this is related (except maybe on the fact that it may
create the situation in the beginning, but since the sad computer
remain after reboots, what is corrupted remains even after the process
problem is solved,

PS2: hum and I also must say that I use the nvidia drivers. I know
this is not the best setup to ask for help here, but this is mandated
by my company, and I believe that the problem is more to be found
somewhere in the gnome configuration files than in some drivers settings.

PS3: Generally speaking, gnome works great (even though some interface
choices might or might not please people), but when it fails it is
sometimes very difficult to understand where the problem is....
This is true for some small problems (failure in applets at start
which seems realted to timings problems and are easily solved by
re-logging), but in the case of this sad computer, I believe that more
information should be provided on what fails (or at least where to
look for that information).