Fixingor reinstalling Gnome/Nautilus

[Jay Derus <jderus cs washington edu>]

Okay, I will preface with: This is my first time doing any linux  admin, 
and my first experiences with Gnome. Furthermore, Im essentially a linux 
novice, and whatever I have learned I usually forget because of sparse 
using trends.

My system setup is Mandrake 10.0 download, with Gnome 2.4 (came with the 
download). Nothing too fancy as far as options were installed - Apache, 
MySQL and I set up GnuMP3d recently as well. Other than this, everything 
is essentially Mandrake/Gnome defaults.

Now, somehow, somewhere in the course of a physical installation of a new 
hard drive (which required BIOS update and of course partitioning and 
mounting), Gnome broke. Im not sure exactly when this happened, but I 
theorize it happened sometime when I tried to fix the hard drive mount 
(and might have accidentally been in that directory in another terminal).

The broken behaviour is Nautilus core dumping for every user (including 
root). The visible manifestation of this is that every desktop is empty, 
and there is no ability for graphical file browsing.

If at all possible I would just like to repair the install. Im not really 
sure how to do this though, as again ... I am noob. Furthermore I know 
little of what came with the Mandrake downloads, and where on the disks 
this stuff might be.

If I have to reinstall Gnome, I dont mind. I wont loose many 
prefs/settings. But I dont know how to do this either.

Any info, pointers, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.