Strange behavior from gnome apps recently

["Mark Hull-Richter" <mhullrich gmail com>]

I have been having the following really oddball problems since I
returned from vacation this last Monday (one week off, computer off,
...).

I am running gnome 2.16.0 on CentOS 5.0.  A great many of my nautilus
file associations are gone (doc, rtf, pdf, jpg to name those I'm sure
of).  Some of the ones I've restored do not work properly (e.g., I
reset JPGs to open with the image file viewer, but sometimes it
doesn't advance through a directory the way it used to and sometimes
it does not).  I had to restore the PDF association (Adobe Acrobat
Reader 7.0) twice (different directories, I think).

This is really annoying - why did they get lost and why don't they
work right or stick any more?

Another problem I may have mentioned (can't find a record of so doing)
here - for some reason I cannot print any graphics files.  Whenever I
try, the printer chokes and dies.  I have a Minolta PagePro 1100 (NOT
the 1100L) laser printer, and it won't print anything from the GIMP,
and it won't print PDFs that are mostly graphics, either from the
Adcrobat Reader or from the PS files AR produces when I print the file
to a file.  I have NO trouble at all printing these same files from a
Windows guest running under VMWare (except that has also crapped out
on me for the time being - separate issue).  I'm running the pclmono
driver under CUPS for this printer, which is the recommended driver
according to CUPS, and it works fine for simple graphics and virtually
all text files, plus anything printed from SeaMonkey or FireFox.

?????

mhr