“In an ideal world, whenever a program cannot perform a function it exits with a useful error message, giving you enough clues to fix the problem. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world — at least, not all the time. Sometimes when an application encounters an error, you are none the wiser.” Read the article at DevChannel.org by Gerard Beekmans.
Heh, I had a similar problem with KDE not very long ago. You can shoot yourself in the foot with permissions if you’re not too careful