Need to recover from system crash

[Michael J. O'Donnell]

My Lenovo ThinkPad T61, running Ubuntu Karmic Koala
> odonnell at Tumbleweed:~$ cat /proc/version
> Linux version 2.6.31-9-rt (buildd at yellow) (gcc version 4.4.1 (Ubuntu
> 4.4.1-4ubuntu8) ) #152-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT RT Thu Oct 15 13:22:24 UTC 2009
crashed, probably due to overheating. There was some file system damage,
which I repaired with a manual fsck. It did not appear to be serious. I
don't understand the details of repair with fsck, and I accept proposals
thoughtlessly, but I have recovered from larger looking problems in the
past (lots more proposed changes) with no permanent loss of data, and
this one appeared quite slight.

Now, when I attempt to run gnucash, it fails:
> odonnell at Tumbleweed:~$ gnucash --debug --extra --nofile
> gnc.bin-Message: main: binreloc relocation support was disabled at
> configure time.
>
> ERROR: In procedure append:
> ERROR: Wrong type argument in position 1 (expecting NULLP):
Before the first line ("gnc.bin-Message: ..."), I get the popup window
complaining that Gnucash "Cannot find default values", which I have been
seeing for some time, and I have made sure that ~/.gconf.path is
correct, so I just select "Skip":
> odonnell at Tumbleweed:~$ cat .gconf.path
> ######## The following lines were added by GnuCash. ########
> xml:readwrite:$(HOME)/.gconf
> xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults
> ############## End of lines added by GnuCash. ##############
I get the same result running gnucash with no arguments, but I hoped for
extra information from --debug, and I thought that --nofile might
eliminate a problem reading the file. The accounts.gnucash that I would
normally read has not changed for some days, and I am pretty sure that
it is not at fault. I also tried reinstalling the gnucash and
gnucash-common packages with synaptic, and got no change.

Here is the only log file that I know of, and the contents are
meaningless to me:
> odonnell at Tumbleweed:/tmp$ cat gnucash.trace
> * 23:21:44  WARN <GLib> g_set_prgname() called multiple times
> * 23:21:44  WARN <GnomeUI> While connecting to session manager:
> None of the authentication protocols specified are supported.
I grepped for "gnucash" on all of the logs in /var/log, and the only
listings had to do with dpkg reinstalling, and with the popularity contest.

The crash also lost my printer configuration, but that was easy to
recover with printer setup wizards (I mention it as evidence that some
data somewhere were corrupted, so perhaps some system information
regarding gnucash were also corrupted, and not corrected in the reinstall).

So, I hope that someone can suggest a path to recovery. The data in my
accounts are crucial to me, but I have an external backup at RAID-1
redundancy, and I am pretty sure that I can get at the data by moving to
another system. Nonetheless, it will be much nicer to solve the problem
on the normal home system.

Thanks,

Mike O'Donnell