How to determine whether to reinstall or repair

[sofasurfer]

I am having system problems. I am tempted to reinstall the system but I am thinking maybe its time that I learned a little about repairing a disfunctional system.

How do I determine what is the best coarse of action?

I have only been installed for a couple of weeks. I have done video card installation, installed drivers for differant video formats, (unsuccsessful) tv tuner installation, etc. Till now my system was running fine.

The other day I glitched my wireless setup. After getting it all working again I noticed that Firefox takes over a minute to open. Some of my programs such as synaptic and at least a couple other (that I can't remember right now) will not open. They start to open, to the point where they appear in the task bar, but then they disappear.

I can't beleive that my wireless setup could have effected things in this way, but it WAS at this point that my system went buggy. The problem with the wireless was only a misconfiguration of the encryption key and the difficulty I had with getting it fixed was simply that I forgot the proceedure for a while.

So my question is this, is this a major problem, is it a problem of unknown difficulty or is it a peice of cake that simply needs some tweeking and maybe a couple a package reinstallaions?

[VMC]

Have you checked your system log files to see if anything there might lead you to a resolution? (System > Administration > System Log). Also 'dmesg' output

[yogo]

Some of my programs such as synaptic and at least a couple other (that I can't remember right now) will not open. They start to open, to the point where they appear in the task bar, but then they disappear.


Any possibility, you have a theme that is acting up, I have noticed a few themes can cause a lot of quirky things like you mention ie programs starting but not really starting.

try gksu nautilus, if a theme is acting up, it will normally give you that error in terminal when mounting the gnome extension.