Comment 9 for bug 544139

Same problem here, on all our production machines. Like Chris I have the following messages in daemon.log:

WARNING: Error waiting for native console X activation: Invalid argument

Only for me X grows from 1 to 62, so I have 62 messages there. (Oddly, the two last ones are 62 *then* 61)

Symptoms for the user are (AFAICT):
- no sound
- no mounting of external drives
- impossibility to power down/suspend (in my case the power off and suspend options are not visible in the system menu)
- many (if not all) tasks that require admin privileges cannot be performed. For instance, the user-admin interface does not ask for the admin password; its controls are simply inoperative.

The bug is already visible in GDM, in that it does not show the suspend option in the power menu (lower right icon). GDM does show the power off option, but clicking it does nothing.

I second Hendrik on this, this bug should be set to critical:
- the a lack of functionality resulting from this bug is _very_ bad. Even "commercial" operating systems don't behave like that ;-)
- this happens every now and then, which is even more frustrating and hard to track down for a any user
- a stock 10.04 install has this problem.
- this has been reported multiple times already
- this bug is 3 months old and no fix seems to have been released (if there is one please let us know :-)

I don't know heck about consolekit but I will certainly be happy test any solution that will be proposed.

Let's squish this ugly bug!!!