Comment 2 for bug 227780

Further to this bug report, although the error was fatal as an error, it did not leave the system totally unusable. On reboot 8.04 was there with an error message about loading gnome - a second reboot cured this. However, it is not possible to get most programs to run from the desktop. Firefox is OK but others, eg synaptic or update manager do not load from the desktop. Open office does run but open office base refuses to run forms giving an error message that Java is not properly installed - it is and, to be sure, I reloaded it after activating synaptic from the command line. If it were DOS, I would think that the paths had not been set.

hope this helps
Ian Mackee