GNOME randomly reverts to default theme, then refuses to touch Nautilus

[napzilla]

GNOME and Nautilus have been giving me some relatively minor, but really irritating, trouble. I'm using the standard version of the "New Wave" theme for GNOME. I do most of my file-manager-type stuff in a terminal window, but occasionally I use Nautilus to sort through photographs, PDFs, and videos. When it's working properly, it looks like thus:

Lately, however, GNOME has been randomly reverting to its default theme right in the middle of my session. Even more bizarre, it then switches back to "New Wave" the instant I open the "Appearance Preferences" menu, but it refuses to touch Nautilus, so the File Browser still looks like thus:

I could probably live with the issue, except that this default Nautilus display plays those intolerable "popping" sounds every time I do something. That just drives me nuts.
I checked the system log the last time this happened, and the following line might correspond to the random theme change:

Sep 16 04:12:22 inspiron kernel: [1148313.906500] gnome-settings-[18663]: segfault at 4 ip 04b0096f sp bf8da180 error 4 in libclipboard.so[4afe000+5000]

Running the gnome-settings-daemon doesn't solve the issue with Nautilus, though. I searched the forums and couldn't find any indication that this has been an issue with other people, but it seems like it should be a simple problem to resolve. Any ideas?

Okay, it just did it again, and the syslog contains a similar message:

Sep 16 04:55:27 inspiron kernel: [1150898.781685] gnome-settings-[8926]: segfault at 4 ip 0133296f sp bfec7630 error 4 in libclipboard.so[1330000+5000]

[OmegaPhil]

Just posting to say that this is also an issue for me (has happened routinely recently) - my theme is Mist.

Example of the error here:

gnome-settings-[25854]: segfault at 8 ip 00007f3450b31ffb sp 00007fffe4017870 error 4 in libclipboard.so[7f3450b2f000+6000]

I wasn't using the clipboard at the time.

[inductiveload]

This also happens for me, but I don't have libclipboard crash in my syslog, though I do have a lot of scim-bridge crashes, which seem to be related to this scim-bridge bug and my have nothing to do with this.

kernel: [ 3796.858979] scim-bridge[2205]: segfault at c ip 00600ecc sp bfcc77a8 error 4 in libscim-1.0.so.8.2.4[5a8000+c2000]

My theme is (supposed to be) Nimbus.

[darius.k]

Bumping the thread, because this has started happening to me in the past two days. As soon as I open up the Appereance settings the normal theme is applied. I have to kill and restart nautilus to have it apply it though.

[STurner31]

I'm bumping the thread because this is an issue for me, too.

I started with a clean install of Kubuntu 10.04 about three months ago, then I added GNOME with the Ubuntu Studio packages from the package manager. My theme should be the default Ubuntu Studio theme, but it changes randomly to the default GNOME theme. It usually happens after I have been running several programs at once for an extended period.

E.G. 1) I was running OOffice Impress and Calc, Opera, Okular, the GIMP, and Dolphin for about 3 hours yesterday while I was building a presentation. After closing Okular, the GIMP and both OOffice programs, I noticed my Desktop Icons had changed.

2)Today I was running Konqueror, Dolphin, Opera, and had a terminal open while I was sorting and editing files (about 1 hour). After closing Konqueror, Dolphin, and Terminal, the icons had changed again.

The common element in my case is running multiple programs and then closing most (or all) of them at the same time. If I logout and log back in, the theme resets to the Ubuntu Studio theme. I hope this information helps.

[Damiel]

same problem here.

Nov  3 20:51:51 amnesiac kernel: [ 5749.638558] gnome-settings-[1912]: segfault at 4 ip 022b596f sp bfd8b290 error 4 in libclipboard.so[22b3000+5000]

[STurner31]

It happened again just a moment ago. This time I was running Opera, Konqueror, Audacious, and Kate. I had 3 files open in Kate, and after I was done editing them I closed each one. Immediately, the theme changed to the default GNOME theme. When I pulled up the GNOME menu to go to System->Preferences->Appearances, the window borders and menu appearance changed back from default GNOME to default Ubuntu Studio, but the icons remained default GNOME. Changing the icon setting under Appearance had no effect.

BTW, I would like to verify that I have the same message in Syslog as the rest of the posters ITT, but where do I look to check it? I'm a quick learner, but I'm still new to this OS.

Also, where and how do I report this as a bug? I feel like this thread is a good place to verify that this issue is affecting multiple users, but it's probably not the official place to come to notify someone that can fix this.

[OmegaPhil]

System -> Administration -> Log File Viewer. Its a GUI frontend to the text files in '/var/log'.

Check out the syslog file (I think this contains everything that is thrown at the syslog daemon - other files represent a filtered subset of those messages).

[STurner31]

gnome-settings-[1411]: segfault at 4 ip 0838396f sp bfaebdc0 error 4 in libclipboard.so[8381000+5000]

That's what I found in syslog. Thanks, OmegaPhil, for telling me how to check it. Now if we can only figure out what causes it...

[STurner31]

After googling "error 4 in libclipboard" I found this:

http://osdir.com/ml/debian-bugs-dist.../msg02731.html

where it is recommended to do a backtrace as described here:

http://wiki.debian.org/HowToGetABacktrace

the trouble is, this looks a little too advanced for me. Can someone else try to get a backtrace and maybe we can get this bug sorted out?

In the meantime, I'll certainly try to do it myself, but I'm going to have to teach myself how.