I removed accessibility support from my USE flags, and to removed any 'junk' ebuilds, I looked at the gnome ebuild, and under the depends, was the accessibility USE flag, and gail under it. I removed gail and nautilus failed to start, so I re-emerged it, but the configure failed, stating that it needed gail. Remerging gail fixed this problem. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Unmerge Gail 2. Attempt to reinstall nautilus (gail will not be listed as a dependancy) 3. remerge gail manually. Portage 2.0.50-r6 (default-x86-1.4, gcc-3.3.3, glibc-2.3.3_pre20040420-r0, 2.6.5-love5) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.5-love5 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) Processor Gentoo Base System version 1.4.10 distcc 2.13 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [enabled] ccache version 2.3 [enabled] Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59-r3 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.8.3 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86 ~x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=athlon -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -frename-registers -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="gcc3" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/pref /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control"CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/env.d /etc/gconf /etc/init.d /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d"CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -frename-registers -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache digest distcc sandbox userpriv" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirrors.tds.net/gentoo http://www.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="-j3" PKGDIR="/var/pub/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage /usr/local/bmg" SYNC="rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="3dnow S3TC X X509 Xaw3d aalib acpi acpi4linux aim alsa apache2 audiofile avi bonobo caps cddb cdr chroot cjk clanJavaScript clanVoice crypt cups curl dga directfb divx dnd encode esd ethereal evo ext-png faad fam fbcon fbdev flac foomaticdb freetype fs gif gimpprint gnome gnomedb gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile imlib imlib2 jabber java javascript jpeg ldap libg++ libwww mad maildir mbox md5sum mldonkeypango mmx mng mozilla moznocompose moznoirc moznomail mpeg mpeg4 mpi ncurses nls nocardbus nocd nodod nowin nptl nvidia objc offensive oggvorbis openal opengl openssh oscar oss pam pdflib pic png ppds quicktime readline samba sasl sdl slp spell src ssl stencil-buffer svga tcltk tcpd threads truetype unicode usb videos wxwindows x86 xchattext xgetdefault xine xml xml2 xosd xv xvid yahoo"
eel depends on gail, nautilus on eel. And no, you shouldn't just remove libs on a live system. That's guaranteed to give problems.