Comment 3 for bug 1249493

Thanks for the investigation, and yes, this three stage lookup exists for most of Onboard's files. The problem seems to be that stage 1) is meant for absolute paths, rather than local directories, but this isn't enforced. As you discovered, having a file in the current directory with the same name as the layout to be loaded triggers this bug.
I think, instead of looking at the various extensions, we can simply check for an absolute path. I'll look into that.

Good to hear you're happy with 0.99. I appreciate the feedback, we don't get that much for Precise.

One more suggestion: you can of course copy layouts by hand, but the easiest way to start a new layout is by pressing the "Personalize" button in Preferences->Layouts. This way you get copies of all the necessary files, and the filename references in the *.onboard file are adjusted too.