The summary says it all.
The good news is that the problem is easily reproducible so tracking down
the bug should be possible. I discovered it by accident when moving my
company accounts files from my home PC to my new office PC, I did this by
burning them onto CD and copying them from that. Unfortunately I did it as
root and forgot to select 'Preserve permissions' in K3B so the copied files
were all owned by root but had global read permissions. I am running
Mandrake 9.1, but I don't think this has anything to do with the bug.

To reproduce the bug:
Make the directory which contains the accounts file and the files within it
read-only (I have been told only the folder needs to be read only)

Start GNUcash from the menu and open the file (if it automatically opens
the file at start up the result is the same)

You get the message:
           GNUcash could not obtain the lock
Select 'Open Anyway '
Make some changes - actually you don't need to make any changes to get the bug
Save the file, you get the message:
         Error: An error occurred while processing  /path/filename
Select OK then Cancel on the File Save dialogue that appears
Save again (originally I did Save As), you get the message:
   Application "/usr/bin/guile-1.41" (process 16239) has crashed due to a
fatal error. (Segmentation fault)
Select Close

And that's it, GNUcash terminates without saving your changes


Vince