Possible library numbering problem

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

Linux/Unix doesn't get DLL Hell, but only when libraries are versioned
properly.  Ultimately, the problem I ran into was my fault, but there's
a possibility that it could have been prevented.

I just upgraded to Helix Gnome 1.2 (excellent installer, by the way). 
When I started GNOME the first time, tasklist_applet and
deskguide_applet kept crashing.  Unfortunately, panel (or is it
gnome-session?) doesn't just give up at this point, it repeatedly tries
loading it on the theory that it might succeed eventually.  This spams
the UI with GNOME crash windows and if sound is enabled queues up a big
long list of crash sounds.  Very annoying, especially since it happened
to me probably 20 times as I debugged the problem.

I eventually figured out that I had an old version of
libpanel_applet.so.0 in /usr/local/lib, which is ahead of /usr/lib in my
/etc/ld.so.conf file.  This older version was apparently incompatible
with the *_applets, causing them to crash.

Obviously I shouldn't have old compiled-from-source shared objects
laying around when also trying to use binary RPMs.  However, one wonders
why, if libpanel_applet.so interface's semantics have changed, it hasn't
gotten a new version number.

If we can't fix that, we should at least fix the
relaunch-until-it-succeeds problem.  If it fails to launch the first
time, it isn't likely to ever succeed without human intervention.
-- 
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m