Hi Willie,
You might try running the following via Alt+F2 to see what happens: python -c "import gtk; gtk.gdk.display_get_default()"
Thanks; that helped. The problem had nothing to do with Orca. I had upgraded Python to 2.5 without recompiling some modules (Gentoo didn't stop me frolm doing this), and it couldn't find cairo because it was compiled for 2.4 but not 2.5. I had run into similar problems before.
Now I'm running into another problem where it starts and says "Welcome to Orca!" via eSpeak but won't say anything else. If I stop X, then it starts to say something else, so I think that it is a gnome-speech/eSpeak problem. I vaguely remember someone else on the list having problems when upgrading eSpeak to 1.26. If I run test-speech, it says that it can't activate the eSpeak driver. I tried changing eSpeak to Festival in orca.settings.speechServerInfo in ~/orca/user-settings.py, hoping that it would make Festival load, but it still tries to use eSpeak.
I also see "anykey" printed to the console repeatedly, but I'm not sure where this is coming from.