Linux viewer suddenly stopped working

RL got in the way for a week or so and I haven't been on SL in a while, but tonight I tried... and it crashes every time during the login sequence (when it says "Initializing Multimedia".

As far as I know, nothing has changed since the last successful login - hardware certainly has not changed, nor have I installed any new drivers. I'm on Arch Linux with a 2.6.28 kernel, xorg 1.5.3, nvidia geforce 4000 MX. glxgears rips right along at about 800fps in the default small window and about 150fps in 1024x768; alsa is working fine and plays sounds.

It's not a rights issue, because both root and my non-root login have the same problem. My primary and alt accounts crash at the same place. Both the vanilla SL viewer 1.21.6.99587 and Cool Viewer crash at the same place. The crash log is empty, and the primary log only makes note of the fact that it crashed:

2009-02-02T02:10:04Z INFO: LLAgent:etRegion: Moving agent into region: located at 63.210.159.232:13000
2009-02-02T02:10:04Z INFO: setStartupState: Startup state changing from STATE_WORLD_INIT to (state #12)
2009-02-02T02:10:05Z INFO: do_elfio_glibc_backtrace: Opening stack trace file /root/.secondlife/logs/stack_trace.log
2009-02-02T02:10:06Z INFO: do_elfio_glibc_backtrace: Finished generating stack trace.
2009-02-02T02:10:06Z INFO: handleViewerCrash: Handle viewer crash entry.

The one other bit of information I can throw on this fire is that I can log in just fine from my wife's laptop running Vista.

Any thoughts on what suddenly broke? Has anyone else experienced recent crashes on a system that was working fine?

Maybe a GStreamer issue? What's in .secondlife/logs/stack_trace.log ?

The only way for a program to run yesterday but not today is for something in the program itself or its environment (OS, etc.) to change.

A few things come to mind:
1. Something in your .secondlife folder got corrupted.

2. Some file in the program folder got corrupted.

3. An automatic update utility updated a lib or driver with one unsupported by SL or is itself broken.

4. Some piece of hardware broke, like a video card.

Start with the easy one first. Rename .secondlife to anything.secondlife and restart SL. You will need your password because that is stored in the original .secondlife folder (the one you just renamed).

The second one is pretty simple: re-install the program.

The third option will involve finding out which lib or driver is causing the problem. Try running sl from a terminal and examine the output. The last few lines should provide some clue.

The fourth will require some extensive testing of components (or swapping them out). That subject being too involved for this posting, let's just hope the first one fixes the problem.

Hope this helps.

It must have been one of the updates I installed for Arch Linux that screwed up GStreamer... once I reinstalled that, everything worked great. Thanks for the suggestions, all!