I thought initially this was a GNOME bug but perhaps not. Running GNOME on RH6.0 (with a 2.2.9-ac-something kernel) on an i586. man userinfo: typo in "options" - should be no apostrophe in 'its'. (same in man userhelper, come to think of it) And when you run userinfo in X, either from a gnome-terminal or from the gnome menu, it displays the information, gives you two options (Okay and Exit) and clicking on okay leads to a 'error: invalid call to subprocess' message. If you peer at this error message long enough without clicking okay on it ("long enough" for me is about fifteen seconds) everything goes very slow and begins to lock up. First time I did this, I finally got back to a virtual console to find the errors just in time to see the X server die. userinfo kept running and 'top' showed it eating 129meg and with 30% of CPU and 60% of the memory. Ouch. If you run it from a gnome-terminal, you get an additional error message about "/usr/sbin/userhelper: option requires an argument -- f". Marked as high because I think killing X servers and eating memory like that is probably a bit worse than typos.
Typo needs to be fixed. In addition, I am able to recreate error after clicking "OK" in the display. Not able to recreate the memory leak as described.
I have recreated the memory leak once, but cannot do it reliably. It only happened once while I was debugging trying to find another problem, which also went away. See also bug #2362, which I was debugging when I saw this problem.
Just reported that clearing a field can cause this, will be investigating...
Unfortunately, I can't reproduce that problem, either, on my machine. What version of glib are you running? (rpm -q glib)
Found and fixed -- or, since I can't reproduce this on demand, I have made a change in the source code to something that might have been causing this and was certainly wrong. If you can reproduce this with usermode-1.14 or later, I definitely want to know about it.
Actually, get usermode-1.15 or later, as that fixes some other bugs where "random" things wouldn't get set properly.
Get usermode-1.15 from where? I couldn't get onto redhat's ftp site, and hensa (ftp.hensa.ac.uk, a reasonably good mirror) has 1.10 as the latest. That aside, I eventually got a copy, and yes, appears fixed: no error message when I run it from gnome-terminal a 'password' box pops up instead of the error message now and I haven't managed to make it go mad again since. Thanks!
Thanks for testing.