Geany and Leafpad close immediately after opening. Is there some way to determine why this is? I have to use the terminal to read the logs but I don't see anything in dmesg and Xorg.0.log but I also have no idea what to look for. Reinstalling the apps from the Synaptic Package Manager did not help. Thanks.

For some reason this problem has gone away on its own. Maybe it was an incompatible theme or something.

how much ram on the system in question? when things start closing themselves i wonder if oom-killer is involved.

geany and leafpad dont use much, though if youre very close, no swap and have a large enough browser running... also would explain why it went away.

it could always be something else-- even a noisy power supply.

It definitely wasn't RAM. I have 1 GB and have never seen more than half of that in use.

Open a terminal emulator window (roxterm or lxterminal or whatever) and type geany (or leafpad) to launch it via commandline.
By launching programs this way, you can often see useful error messages displayed to the terminal output.

skidoo wrote: Open a terminal emulator window (roxterm or lxterminal or whatever) and type geany (or leafpad) to launch it via commandline.
By launching programs this way, you can often see useful error messages displayed to the terminal output.

Thanks! I'll try that next time this madness happens.