Help viewer crashing

[kareemy <kareemy gmail com>]

Hello,

I am experiencing 3 different types of undesired behavior recently in
gnome 2.10 all related to clicking help within an application.

In gconf-editor when I click Help>Contents, it crashes. A pop up comes
up with "The Application "gconf-editor" has quit unexpectedly". I am
using optimized builds of gnome so a backtrace was not very helpful.
Clicking the Help button in bug-buddy also has the same result.

In the gnome-game gataxx clicking Help>Contents does absolutely
nothing. No errors are reported. This happens in many other
applications, gataxx was just an example.

Finally in Keyboard preferences and other preferences windows clicking
the Help button causes an Error dialog to pop up claiming "There was
an error displaying help: There is no default action associated with
this location."

I firmly believe I messed something up, but cannot figure out what it
was. I modifed /desktop/gnome/applications/help_viewer entry in
gconf-editor once before, but I believe I set it back to its original
setting. The field accepts_urls is checked, exec = "nautilus",
needs_term is unchecked.

The environmental variable $XDG_DATA_DIRS is set to
"/usr/share:/opt/gnome-2.10/share"

Does anyone have any ideas of what I can check or test to figure out
what I messed up here?

Thanks a lot,
Kareem