maemo.org - Talk - Canola installation hosed

I first noticed a problem last week, after synching over a new set of MP3s: one album's worth of songs appeared in Canola but wouldn't play. (The other albums played fine.) Then over the weekend, I was travelling. At one point, after powering it up and checking email, I started Canola and played a song, but it was mostly unused. Then on the trip back, I powered it off when I got on the plane, then restarted to listen to music for the trip. Canola would not start, I never saw any UI for it at all. So I tried using the default media player; it would start, and it would find the songs, but it wouldn't play anything.

When I got home, I ran Canola from a shell window (over SSH) and it was throwing an error when reading the 'settings' file. I located that and found it was 0 bytes, so I renamed it. A new 'settings' file was created, as I had hoped; however, Canola started with a hung UI. Starting from the shell shows an error: Failed to execute dbus-launch. (I can run dbus-launch from the shell with no apparent error, but I don't know what arguments Canola is passing to that program.)

So, fine: I'll reinstall Canola. Except, I couldn't start the Application Manager. This got me thinking that I was going to have to reflash. I tested some other apps, like Tear (my #2 application after Canola) and didn't see any other problems.

I sat down with it again today. Somehow, Application Manager is running again, altho it failed to launch one other time, immediately after I saw the "Failed to execute dbus-launch" error. I've uninstalled Canola and reinstalled; no change. Uninstalled again, then installed and ran canola-cleanup, and reinstalled. Now it's telling me there is no /etc/canola.conf -- which is true, but why didn't that get created on installation?

Also, the issue with Media Player is still there: it sees the MP3s on the SD card but can't load them to play.

How can I fix this? Maybe I do need to reflash, but boy I'd really rather not.