Yup, turning off gtk-qt-engine fixed it! Many thanks, Tavian. Googling suggests this is known upstream: http://code.google.com/p/gtk-qt-engine/issues/detail?id=51 . For anyone else who runs across the same problem, the Ubuntu page for the bug (#270972 in launchpad) also gives a nice workaround that allows gvim to work perfectly well with gtk-qt-engine: `gvim -X`. Thanks again, Simon On Sunday 12 September 2010 16:26:39 Tavian Barnes wrote:

The KSharedDataCache info messages are probably a result of gtk-qt-engine. Maybe try a different GTK theme?

On 12 September 2010 11:14, Simon Woolf <simon.woolf@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hi all,

Subject line says it all, really -- installed gvim, and on opening it, I get a blank, empty, grey window: http://i.imgur.com/DUUIO.png .

That's if opening it normally; opened from a terminal, it prints:

(18816) KSharedDataCache::Private::mapSharedMemory: Opening cache "/var/tmp/kdecache-simon/icon-cache.kcache" page size is 4096 (18816) KSharedDataCache::Private::mapSharedMemory: Attached to cache, determining if it must be initialized (18816) KSharedDataCache::Private::mapSharedMemory: Cache fully initialized -- attached to memory mapping (18816) KSharedDataCache::Private::mapSharedMemory: 4636672 bytes available out of 10485760

...And then nothing -- not even a grey window.

Reinstalling gvim & vim-runtime has no effect. I would try aur/vim-gtk instead of extra/gvim, but it seems to be unbuildable -- one of the sources gives a 404. If relevant, Arch is up to date, and is broadly KDE4.5 (with compiz and bmpanel2 used in place of kwin and plasma).

Since I haven't heard anyone else have this problem with gvim, I assume it's just me. Anyone had anything liike this before? Any ideas?

Thanks to all in advance.

Simon Woolf