GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 708989
Failed to contact configuration server makes GnuCash inoperable
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:19:33 UTC
I installed GnuCash on Windows 7 and I am using it for a couple of years now. At one point I received the following error message "Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: IOR file 'C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\gconfd-Username/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory 2: IOR file 'C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\gconfd-Username/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd located: No such file or directory)" I do not know what caused this error message. Uninstalling GnuCash, removing an empty gnucash folder in C:\Program Files (x86)\, and reinstalling Gnucash does not restore GnuCash. I.e., same error message was produced. Cleaning up the windows registry did not help either. What did work was to remove the folder C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\gconfd-Username/ which did not contain the subdirectory + file lock/ior that is mentioned in the error message. The folder AppData is hidden (for Windows 7) and needs to be explicitly typed in the folder browser.
Thank you for reporting this bug and especially to document how you managed to fix it. ORBit and GConf are two external GnuCash dependencies that have historically caused several issues on Windows. The good news is that the upcoming GnuCash 2.6 no longer depends on these two. The (relatively) bad news is that since the 2.6 release is coming close I won't try to come up with a fix for this any more for 2.4. But your information is still valuable for other people that may encounter the same issue while still running 2.4. So I have added your fix to our Windows Wiki page: http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Windows#Gnucash_fails_to_start_with_Failed_to_contact_configuration_server Thanks again for your report!
GnuCash bug tracking has moved to a new Bugzilla host. This bug has been copied to https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708989. Please update any external references or bookmarks.