problems with /usr/sbin/neat, etc.

[Alexander Volovics <awol home nl>]

Hello,

Today I was trying to configure dialup networking using the
"Internet Configuration Wizard" from the System entry in the
Gnome Main Menu. (/usr/bin/internet-druid).

This was not a succes. I couldn't get it working.
However that is not a problem because I don't need it. 
I am on cable. I was just trying to configure it to show how
it works for a Linux demonstration I am giving on Monday.

I did a lot of fooling around with wvdial and minicom to see
what was happening.

Those were the only things I did before I tried to start up
Network Configuration to have a look. (/usr/bin/neat).

neat wouldn't start up anymore! The window appears shortly
and then immediately disappears again. It makes no difference
whether started from the command line or the menu.

When started from the command line the following message appears:
"IndexError: list assignment index out of range".

I immediately tried 'internet-druid', 'up2date' and 'up2date-config'.
Exactly the same. Neither would start up anymore.
THe window appears and immediately disappears.

Al this is on my laptop with enigma including all the updates.

This problem is reminiscent of what happened in the second RH 7.2
beta with a buggy pam update. Exactly the same symptoms.

Now too I had just installed the recent pam (pam-0.75-19) update.
However now pam is not the problem:

1) I have the same configuration on my desktop machine (enigma +
   the most recent updates, including pam-0.75-19) and I have no
   problems there whatever with up2date, up2date-config or neat.
   Everything works perfectly.
   (I have never run pppd on the desktop machine because I have no
    modem on that machine).

2) I reinstalled the previous pam (pam-0.75-16) and even the pam
   from the cd on my laptop. It made no difference. 
   up2date, up2date-config, neat and internet-druid remained broken.

I checked everything I could think of that might be relevant but could
find no strange entries anywhere.

I would appreciate it very much if somebody could give me a hint
what the problem is and how it could be resolved. I need to get this
working again before monday.  

Alexander