Plasma Shell, Segmentation fault on start-up

[kio_http]

Do you have any weird widgets that you installed? What is the last change that you did before this happened? Did you try updating to KDE 4.9.1 (see kubuntu.org to do that)?

What graphics card do you have?

Try turning of desktop effects in system settings and see if the issue persists.

[Mookawaka]

By setting up the KUBUNTU backports repository and updating to KDE 4.9 the segmentation faults are no longer happening. It would appear that they ironed out some of the bugs upstream.
((SOLVED!))

kio_http, that is a very nice little kde/kubuntu optimisation guide that you have attached to your signature. I will be using some of the tips in the near future.

Thanks also to bra|10n for helping to localise this problem.

[linuxrev]

I had a similar problem. After changing settings for a plasma widget, i.c. Worldclock, plasma started to do weird things. After restarting the computer the next day I got this error: "Executable: plasma desktop PID: 2413 Signal: segmentation fault". The screen was black, no desktop panel or systemn tray. Luckily keyboard shortcuts did work, so I could open a terminal. Fearing that I would need to fall back to the blunt 'rename .kde dir' method I tried the following, which worked.

First I made sure the process causing the trouble was really terminated:
$ kill 2413

Then I edited the ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc file. Because I suspected the Worldclock widget to be the villain, I looked for the [Containments] section with the line 'plugin=worldclock' in it, and simply removed this section. That did the job, because I could reboot as normal, and reinstall the worldclock thingy.

--
linuxrev
(LinuxMint 13 / KDE 4.8)