Nepomuk error message appears at startup and won't go away by itself and can't be turned off

[Mark Summerfield]

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with the GNOME desktop.

When I upgraded from 9.10 I noticed an extra icon in the system tray which was for something called Nepomuk and the "semantic desktop". I didn't ask for it and I certainly don't want it. I've managed to get rid of the system tray icon but I cannot get rid of Nepomuk itself. Furthermore, whenever I boot I get a very annoying message box (which isn't even telling the truth). Furthermore the stupid message box doesn't seem to time out so I have to click its close button every time I boot (see screenshot attached). This is aggravating.

I found this thread about it http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9383657
but the most recent entry #6 describes exactly my situation: "same problem here, think for deinstalling the nepomuk, we need to deinstall the python-kde4 package. Which i need for Kmail. (lovely mail program)
How to get rid of nepomuk???". I use Kmail so I'm also stuck with this.

So, how can I get rid of Nepomuk & its annoying message box, while still being able to use Kmail?

[Mark Summerfield (mark-qtrac)]

Why isn't this a bug? Kmail clearly doesn't need nepomuk so why should people be forced to install something they don't need or want to run something else that doesn't need it? So surely it is a bug.

[Prof Shadoko (yann-lecun)]

I agree with Mark: this is clearly a bug. I makes kmail essentially unusable, particularly on a laptop (where nepomuk and friends run down the battery like crazy).

[Cyprien Gay (cyprien-gay)]

I agree too.

[GDR! (gdr.name)]

I was experiencing extreme slowdowns on my system with 4 cores and 4 GB of RAM and the fastest disk I could get running nothing but a browser. After some time it became obvious that the fix is to:
killall -9 virtuoso-t
and the system is responsive again.