Can an installation "deteriorate" over time?

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Author: Siri Amrit Kaur
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
Subject: Can an installation "deteriorate" over time?
I'm running Slackware 10.0 and KDE 3.2.3. I had stuff set up the way I like
it, and little by little things seem to be breaking. I've noticed this
before, and it's almost like I need to do a fresh install to get everything
working again. I'm waiting for 10.1 to come out before I do another install.

For instance, I used to be able to play music CD's from the CD-ROM drive,
either by pressing the play button on the drive or using the KDE CD player or
XMMS. I can't do that anymore. It doesn't "see" /dev/hdd anymore. It used to
work, then a few months ago it got all glitchy. I managed to reconfigure
things somehow in the CD player app and it worked, but now it's failed again.
Any apps I try to use generally lock up while searching for the drive. If it
finds the disc at all, it plays for one second then stops.

When I press the play button on the drive itself, it revs up then slacks off,
over and over. It used to work, now it doesn't. I haven't changed anything
in /etc/fstab, or anything else that I know of. I know the drive is good
because I use it for ripping stuff to my harddrive all the time.

Another example is SMTP in Kmail. It will work fine for months, then suddenly
I can't send mail from tigerflag.com, and neither can my husband in his user
account. I get an error message that it can't find the account. This happened
a few months ago. At one point I rebooted the computer and things were fine
again. When it happened yesterday, I finally toggled the default account to
intergate.com (I use two accounts: smtp.intergate.com and smtp.tigerflag.com)
and it started working again for _both_ accounts. It was like something got
jammed, and once I successfully sent from intergate.com, then tigerflag.com
worked again. It doesn't make any sense!

While I'd appreciate any suggestions for fixing the CD problem, I'm actually
more interested in why my setup seems to be deteriorating over time.

TIA,
Siri Amrit


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