Perhaps this is an issue with disk space? Can the original poster confirm if there was limited available disk space when running alacarte?
The information I can glean from the stack trace is that the menu file (normally at ~/.config/menus/applications.menu) existed but was empty (already). Alacarte doesn't seem to make any checks when saving the file (and the save method is called after every operation), and doesn't make a backup of the original, so I'm guessing this report relates to a situation where alacarte opened for writing the file on a full filesystem, then the write failed, leaving the file at 0-bytes, which caused an unhandled exception. The MenuEditor.save() code should really do the following: try: write the file to a temporary file in the same directory (using mkstmp for safety of course) mv the file to the right filename except: alert the user finally: remove the tmp file (if it wasn't moved) But this approach doesn't fit in well with the design of alacarte and would be quite a laborious fix for such an unlikely bug, so I'm not going to fix it while there are other more important bugs to fix. ** Changed in: alacarte (Ubuntu) Status: Unconfirmed => Confirmed -- Alacarte emptied my Applications menu list. https://launchpad.net/bugs/61340 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs