Just wondering if there is a way to do this, such as: sudo /etc/init.d/<dcop or whatever> restart I don't know what caused this issue; maybe it was because I had left my laptop running without rebooting for a very long time? Everything else seems to be running as I want (fingers crossed), so I have just been able to relax a bit and let the machine go, as I have got it properly trained, and it never disobeys me. So this was a surprise. What happened, first, is that I could not check email, even after I had just sent an email a few minutes earlier. Then when I tried to open a new window in konqueror, I got the same message about dcop launcher. When I rebooted at last, everything seems back to normal, but I wonder if this is not a sign of other problems that I need to address. It seems that restarting dcop would do the trick, but I know very little about this part of how these things actually work. Any recommendations or insights are welcome. Nothing urgent, I think, but I would still like better to understand what's going on. Bill