Staroffice/libreoffice, KDE and X Window crashes
Since yesterday some of the users have been getting errors like this one:

== cut begins =
"The program 'soffice' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)'.
(Details: serial 193 error_code 5 request_code 17 minor_code 0)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

=== cut ends ====

The errors seem to crop up when open or visit text documents in soffice/openoffice/libreoffice.

The program then crashes.

Once the error has appeared it seems impossible to visit or open the file in question again (and as soffice "recovers" old documents after a crash it
then automatically crashes again).


I haven't seen that particular behavior before, but it reminds me of when browsers and KDE goes mad. Bothersomely it sounds like it has started corrupting files, which the user may have to recover from backups at a point before the corruption started.

Before reading on, let the users check their backups are in good order.

I think a reset of libreoffice might clean things up.

That would mean quitting libreoffice and removing all hidden files and directories
with names resembling

.libreoffice

Best to rename it with mv rather than delete it with rm....

Upon next startup, libreoffice will recreate these with sensible defaults.

I have a hunch that the users configuration dates back to star-office days, and contains old things that new programmers have forgotten about.

The snag is that some of their documents may be stored within the .libreoffice tree, they will have to find and move them somewhere safe, outside the .libreoffice directory.

Update:

After writing the above I took a peek at .xsession-errors. At the bottom of this error log are some messages which do seem to speak of a programming error picked up by the KDE. The KDE is an implementation of X-Window which probably explains the description "X errors" the users have been getting above. If it's the KDE causing it, the best way is to remember the procedure

/usr/local/bin/reset-kde

which walks the user through logging-off, deleting .kde directories and files and getting going again. I am a bit concerned that they had to do this so recently that I can remember it happening.

I've also recommended the user exit applications and log-off before leaving the machine for longer than overnight. This will reduce exposure to network and NFS glitches which sometimes confuse KDE and its friends.

Multiple logins on different machines seem to work quite well now, but I wouldn't really trust them not to leave something nasty behind.