gnome apps don't wanna start!

[Michael Bannister <mjb resnet gatech edu>]

Okay folks, here's one for you to figure out:

I'm running Mandrake 6.0 on a PII (I use gnome rather than KDE). Lately
my computer has been having problems, one of the biggest being that at
times, for some really weird reason, I would click on an icon or type a
command in a shell (ie. to start netscape, or gtop, or gtcd, etc) and
nothing would happen for about 5-10 minutes and then all the apps that I
had tried to start would popup really fast one after another. During
this 5-10 minutes the system works normally, very low load, applications
respond nicely, just nothing wants to start. Strange enough but it gets
weirder.

A day or two ago, all gnome apps decided to stop starting entirly. I
thought this was my "usual" problem, but netscape, licq, and kde apps
would start fine, just not anything gnome. Attempting to run things from
the command line would show them doing nothing and just sitting there,
as if they were waiting for something. But they never, ever started. gmc
was running as my desktop and stayed responsive the whole time. I've
rebooted since to try to get an AWE64 working (wouldn't even POST w/ the
damn thing plugged in) and that has seemed to fix the problem.

So, anyone have any ideas about what might be causing either of the
above problems? Suggestions on that damn AWE would be appreciated too =)

Michael Bannister