My N900 is running a bit lumpy since yesterday:

• Media Player won't play any files ("file format not supported")
• Camera and Flashlight won't start ("used by another program")
• Volume button does nothing
• Pulseaudio has cpu usage of 30%, Hildon status menu 50% - both go back to normal when i disable the volume slider in the status menu

These malfunctions occur since a reboot after

• adding the repository for the Maemo SDK and installing gcc and pkg-config
• installing orecchiette 0.3
• installing media-im-status-updater 0.4

I have no idea how to investigate this issue and much less how to fix it. Any idea or all-in-one-click solution?

The only thing from your list I do NOT have is the media-whatever-updater and I am not experiencing any of your problems. Could that be a hint?

Ack! I'm not sure if all of this is caused by orecchiette, but now that I think about it, it's using the same code for managing video input that I was using earlier this year -- and that code shuts down the camera app while the program is running. Not something that orecchiette needs to do... Let me fix that.

I didn't mention I uninstalled all these packages again, but that didn't help.

Hmm. Ok, so if Camera and Flashlight are complaining "used by another program", maybe a list of the running programs could be of use? For example, the output of "top" (or even a full "ps", if you're willing to wade through it all) in the terminal could show some abnormal processes...

I noticed another strange behaviour:
When opening /home/user/ in hamsterfiler the directory is being updated about every second. Other directories are displayed without such flickering.

top, powertop/zzztop and maybe dmesg output would be the place to start.

Something is continuously writing to that directory. Use 'top' as Copernicus suggested and/or 'lsof'.

That was pulseaudio, writing its cookie (I just found out). I commented out "respawn" in /etc/event.d/pulseaudio and killed the process. It didn't help anything else. No camera and no flashlight (no media playing in this case of course).

It happened exactly the same with my spare N900 last week. Tried searching for a fix and i thought that was one of those weird hildon bugs but since it was my second device i've decided to reflash it. The only processes that seemed abnormal (at least that i could identify) were pulseaudio and hildon-status-menu. They both were crazy. Reboot didn't help. The only thing that i remember to install before was sshfs and the problem started right after mounting my work's box /home. Uninstalling sshfs didn't help too. Sorry. At least if i knew that i wasn't alone i'd have tried to help debuging it.