System crash

[callum shipley <callum shipley gmail com>]

Hi. My name's Callum and there's something wrong with my Ubuntu 8.10 system. I think tinkered where I shouldn't have! Yes, I'm absolutely clueless about these things.

This is the error message that pops up whenever I click on anything:

An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for gconf-editor. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.

Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)

I cannot open any application, folder or file. Is there a way to repair the system without losing my data?

Thank you!