I tried to look at the pictures in camera, but everything was crashing for some reason.

Nautlius, eog, gimp, all were having issues.

In the console, I was seeing errors like:

** (eog:5662): WARNING **: URI NOT LOADED

** (eog:5662): WARNING **: Error in parse: Error on line 3799 char 15: Odd character 'h', expected a '>' character to end the start tag of element 'Ucoming'

** (eog:5662): WARNING **: Error on line 3799 char 15: Odd character 'h', expected a '>' character to end the start tag of element 'Ucoming'

** (eog:5662): WARNING **: URI NOT LOADED

** (eog:5662): WARNING **: Error in parse: Error on line 3799 char 15: Odd character 'h', expected a '>' character to end the start tag of element 'Ucoming'

** (eog:5662): WARNING **: Error on line 3799 char 15: Odd character 'h', expected a '>' character to end the start tag of element 'Ucoming'

Both eog and gimp were complaining about the odd character.

I eventually worked out what was going on. My home directory had filled up yet again.

I thought I'd fixed this the other day, by moving firefox's cache directory, and putting a symlink to it, but it seems that firefox doesn't like that, so it just trashes the symlink, and rebuilds it's cache in my home dir.

Browsing had caused it to fill the partition again. I trashed the cache again, and cleaned up more disk space in the partition.

This didn't help, apps were still crashing. I tried logging out and back in, but that didn't fix it. I even tried rebooting, but that didn't fix it either.

Hmm, something's stuffed up hard.

I decided to use strace on eog, when trying to look at the pictures, and I found that it was reading a file ".recently-used", just before it would spit out that error.

I checked in the file, line 3799, and found that it was indeed invalid, based on the format of all other lines.

It looks like the disk filled up during it trying to write in the file, so it had not been able to save the file properly, and resulted in corruption.

I deleted the section out, 3 or 4 lines, and then everything started working again.