Launchers in Gnome menu and panel give error: "Failed to fork (Cannot allocate memory)"

[Andrew]

When I launch any application from the Gnome menu or from a launcher in the Gnome panel, the following error message is displayed:

        Could not launch application
        Failed to fork (Cannot allocate memory)

This does not happen with launchers on the desktop. Working launchers dragged from the desktop to the Gnome panel stop working, and non-working launchers dragged from the Gnome panel to the desktop start working.

My memory is not full (see attachment), but this problem does appear to happen after I've left the system running for several days. This time, it has been 16 days since I last rebooted.

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release: 8.04
Codename: hardy
$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Wed Aug 20 22:56:21 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report, there is no other bug about that, could be specific to your configuration or due to something you installed or changed. do you have a way to trigger the issue easily?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to New. Thanks again!.