When I tried to click uninstalled, but visible program (wine *.exe) in alacarte
it clean ~/.config/menus/gnome-applications.menu file. Then it impossible to
run alacarte again:
---------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 37, in <module>
main()
File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 33, in main
app = MainWindow(datadir, version, sys.argv)
File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 49, in __init__
self.editor = MenuEditor()
File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 36, in __init__
self.__loadMenus()
File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 48, in __loadMenus
self.applications.dom = xml.dom.minidom.parse(self.applications.path)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1918, in parse
return expatbuilder.parse(file)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 924, in parse
result = builder.parseFile(fp)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 211, in parseFile
parser.Parse("", True)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: no element found: line 1, column 0
------------------------------

When I running alacarte before bug in terminal I see next messages during bug-
actions:
--------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 433, in
on_item_tree_show_toggled
    self.editor.setVisible(item, False)
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 221, in setVisible
    self.save()
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 68, in save
    fd.write(re.sub("\n[\s]*([^\n<]*)\n[\s]*</", "\\1</", getattr(self,
menu).dom.toprettyxml().replace('<?xml version="1.0" ?>\n', '')))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 60, in toprettyxml
    return writer.getvalue()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/StringIO.py", line 270, in getvalue
    self.buf += ''.join(self.buflist)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xd1 in position 58: invalid
continuation byte

** (alacarte:5322): WARNING **: Error loading menu layout from
"/home/alex/.config/menus/gnome-applications.menu": File is empty.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 113, in loadUpdates
    self.loadMenus()
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 214, in loadMenus
    self.loadMenu(iters, menu)
  File "/usr/share/alacarte/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 229, in loadMenu
    iters[depth] = self.menu_store.append(None, (icon,
cgi.escape(parent.get_name()), parent))
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get_name'
------------------------------------

I solved it so:
---------
rm ~/.config/menus/gnome-applications.menu
---------
Then default menu was recreated.

Hey Alex,

this is an old bug.

Could you please still reproduce this issue with newer alacarte version
like 3.11.91-1 ?

thanks
regards
althaser