Mageia 4 in VBox: Updates break Cinnamon

[pbearsf]

I downloaded Mageia (64-bit installation DVD iso) for the first time a couple of days ago and installed it in VirtualBox on my HP desktop running Windows 8.1 x64 (with all Windows updates installed). The installation went fine, choosing KDE, Chrome and Cinnamon desktops during the installation. After restarting the VM, Mageia booted perfectly into its default KDE desktop and I was able to log out and re-login choosing Cinnamon, too, with no problem. Later, after I restarted the VM and booted into the default desktop, I installed the pre-chosen updates that popped up in the taskbar, which included the new desktop 3.12.18-1 files. I had made sure the main and update repositories for core, non-free and tainted (both 64-bit and 32-bit) were all activated, according to the instructions on the "Welcome to Mageia!" introductory screens that appear the first time Mageia is started.

After that, I could no longer log in to Cinnamon. Whenever I tried, as soon as Cinnamon started to load, I would see repeated pop-up dialogs saying Cinnamon had crashed ("...working in fallback mode. Would you like to restart Cinnamon?"). Whenever I clicked on "Yes" the same dialog would just pop up again. If I clicked "No," the Cinnamon desktop background and desktop icons would load but nothing else (the taskbar never appeared and the desktop never became functional).

I discarded the first VM and installed Mageia again (mainly because my first VM seemed a bit tight-squeezed at only 12GB, so I did it again reserving 16GB for the virtual machine). This time, I installed the pre-selected updates from within the initially working Cinnamon desktop. This was yesterday and the updates now included desktop 3.12.20-1 (I thought: Oh, two new desktop updates in two days - they must have fixed the problem with Cinnamon). No such luck.

I now seem to have both the 3.12.18 and 3.12.20 desktops available (at least they're both choices on my grub boot screen), but they both have the same problem with Cinnamon as before. It crashes immediately whenever I try to log in to the Cinnamon desktop (but the default KDE desktop is still working fine).

Any idea what's going on here (and why I seem to be the first person to ask -- I would have thought this would be widespread)?

Thanks.

PBear.SF

[ozky]

Similar problems have noticed by mageia developers that cinnamon won't work anymore with vbox but no any solution to fix it.
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.m ... evel/34998