[olpc-help] Sugar GUI applications (activities) won't start

[Andrew]

All worked well for a couple of weeks in our new XO laptop, but i have been installing and running extra apps and changed the DISPLAY variable and added to /etc/hosts a few times.  (currently 

i have yum-installed various apps, including gcc, wvdial, emacs, lynx

yesterday the GUI apps appear to have stopped loading. When invoked from Desktop bottom row of icons, the icons appear in the circle but their status is just "Starting..." ad infinitem, and they just hang in that state and don't load.  Rebooting doesn't seem to help.

The "Terminal Activity" and lynx _do_ load, which suggests to me that the problem is with the GUI apps only.

HOWEVER, it seems to be SUGAR apps, in particular, because when I run  emacs GUI, as user olpc and with DISPLAY=:0 , emacs GUI does come up correctly.

Or maybe i'm barking up the wrong tree, entirely?

/etc/hosts currently has:

127.0.0.1 xo-14-4F-01.localdomain xo-14-4F-01 localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
172.18.0.1      schoolserver

TIA

Andrew