Thanks for the tip Twidi, but the real problem was much stranger than that, and of course entirely my own fault...

The file does exist, dated March 24, around 4pm. At that time I was aboard a train, probably using GRead on 3G, but certainly not messing around with the system :-)

I looked at it and it did not seem visibly corrupted. I renamed it and ran GRead, redid all the settings again, used it a bit then closed it. There was no new .conf file in the directory... although the permissions on Twidi.com looked OK.

It almost seemed as if GRead suddenly decided to use another directory to save its configuration, one it cannot write to.

So I tried running GRead.py from xterm and did the same things, looking for an error message. There was none, but when I checked back in the config folder, this time there was a new file !

Then I ran GRead from the icon short cut again, and again it showed me an empty settings dialog. Ran it from the command line again, and it worked just fine... I was beginning to think I was going mad, when I suddenly remembered : I *did* mess with the system a bit, only a few days later :-)

My hildon-desktop had started eating up CPU again, so I killed and restarted it using dsme-tool. Only I must have done it a root without noticing, so my icons were launching apps with the wrong user ! Some didn't care, others (like GRead or DropN900) acted strangely or just didn't start...

I've just restarted it again, as "user", and of course all is back to normal (although my mistake may have created other problems elsewhere, that I haven't seen yet).

Sorry for wasting your time with my stupid stunts. I hope your company plans didn't suffer too much : after all, the sooner you're a billionaire, the sooner you get back to work on GRead ! :-)