Update: I just realized that the Configuration Editor is gconf-editor, which I'd meant to try out before but forgotten about. Upon examining the settings dzano mentions, I discovered that change_while_connected was checked and search_interval was 600, so I changed those to unchecked and 0 as shown in the image. However, this doesn't seem to have fixed the problem.

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dzano,

I haven't seen that "Configuration Editor" tool before. Is it a separate package I need to install (and if so, what's the package name/repository), or is it something that's already on the system by default (and if so, how do I run it)?

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michaaa62,

I didn't start listing my system configuration because (a) there's a lot to it and I'm not sure I even remember everything I've done and (b) I wasn't entirely certain what info would be most useful for people to hear. I've tried most of the basic things I know about, spent a lot of time blindly poking through my user's dotdirs, the /etc directory, and the gconf repository trying to make sense of it all, and thrown uncountably many search terms at the forums and google, all to no effect, so, quite honestly, I'm *looking* for hairier, more obscure suggestions.

I don't really expect y'all to diagnose my problem for me, I'm just hoping somebody might be able to point me to methods that *I* can use to diagnose it, e.g. how to determine what exactly is being run at startup, ways to view relevant settings (such as this "Configuration Editor" tool dzano mentioned), or information about what files this stuff is likely to be stored in. It seemed to me that this might be more efficient than me trying to remember everything I've ever done to the machine over the past 3+ years and regurgitating it all in a disorganized haystack for people to sort through looking for needles.

But here are a couple things that I can think of that may or may not be relevant.:

(a) I have a desktop activity in actman called "Clear", which has 1 desktop view with no widgets or shortcuts or contacts, and the problem still occurs even with that activity selected. I even very carefully saved the activity with the internet turned off, just in case it was somehow saving that status, and it made no difference.

(b) My USB port is broken, so I swap batteries a lot, and in order to stop it from resetting the stupid "24-hour clock" and "Update automatically" settings for the clock and making me click through the settings wizard on every single goddamn battery swap, I created the empty file /var/dont_start_suw to stop the /etc/X11/Xsession.d/30osso_startup_wizard script from running. However, removing the dont_start_suw file doesn't seem to make the problem go away, so I'm not sure this has anything to do with it, even though I did first create the file right around when the problems started.

(c) I have a few extra things like camera lens launcher, phone speakers switcher, shortcutd, tweakr, FM Carkit, and CSSU Features installed, but nothing that ought to be demanding access to the internet on boot. Same goes for most of my other configuration tweaks --- they've got no clear relationship to networking.

(d) I do have some IM accounts configured --- skype, gmail, and facebook chat --- but they were installed for years without incident before this problem occurred. Same goes for my Mail for Exchange sync with my Google calendar.

Basically I'm asking for help in this fashion because I'm at a complete loss to determine what could be at fault, so I don't even know what to tell you about my configuration that might be helpful for solving this. All my ideas along those lines have so far been dead ends. I'm sorry if this is frustrating, but I will try to provide any specific info that's asked for.