KMail crash on start-up (Was KDE 4.9.5 start-up "Fetch Job Error")

[peter_pclos]

Last year I started a thread under this subject, but got no replies, although the original problem did go away.  However, it  has just returned in a slightly less tractable form, so any help at this juncture would be welcome.

The problem announces itself at boot-up with a pop-up error window labelled "Fetch Job Error  Plasma Desktop Shell" and containing the text

"unable to fetch item from backend (collection 34): unable to contact resource".

Closing the pop-up window leaves all four of my virtual desktops with a common wallpaper image, instead of their individual wallpapers. The virtual desktops also show a trash can, which they don't normally have.  A fuzzy clock widget is present on each virtual desktop as intended, but the customised font colour it had for each desktop has been replaced by white for all four.  Currently under 'Configure your Desktop' KDE is set up to open with a blank session, and I routinely close all apps before shutting the system down, since this seemed to cure things last time round.  However, they don't help this time.

Can anybody suggest a cure for the problem.

[tschommer]

I googled a little and found a KDE bug report. Originally mentioned regarding KDE 4.8.2, it seems to have resurfaced lately.

Look here and see if one of the provided solutions works for you.

[peter_pclos]

Thanks, tschommer, I tried some of the suggestions in your reply, and found that by stopping the akonadi and nepomuk servers the original start-up sequence reappeared without the error message, although I still only saw one common wallpaper image.  However, by going into the Desktops tag in System Settings/Virtual Desktops, I was able to re-tick the 'Different widgets for each desktop' check-box and then the full set of original settings was restored, apart from the KAlarm icon on the panel, which I have manually replaced.

I'm not out of the wood yet, though.  After the re-start, although the akonadi and nepomuk servers are running again they seem to fail to engage with the system properly, since, KMail won't start up.  The error message refers to failure to fetch a resource collection, and if I try starting KMail from the command line in Konsole, I get:

[peter_h@localhost ~]$ kmail
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
KGlobal::locale::Warning your global KLocale is being recreated with a valid main component instead of a fake component, this usually means you tried to call i18n related functions before your main component was created. You should not do that since it most likely will not work
[peter_h@localhost ~]$ kmail2(3808)/libakonadi Akonadi::SpecialCollectionsRequestJob::slotResult: Failed SpecialCollectionsRequestJob::slotResult "Failed to fetch the resource collection."

How do I get KMail back without losing my pre-existing message folders?

Also, the alarm setting options in KAlarm are all greyed out, so I can't reinstate the alarms I use.