Kleopatra PGP Fix

Kleopatra encryption software sometimes has a problem where it hangs on startup. Sometimes the program will start, sometimes not, but if it does you’ll often see a message that says “loading certificate cache” and it never goes farther.

This is pretty easy to fix. The clue as to what is wrong is that in the cases where the system allows you to do a self test kleopatra’s self test reveals that dirmngr test failed.

The self test will say, “dirmngr Cofiguration Check Failed” and then in the details it says, “There was an error executing the GnuPG configuration self-check for dirmngr: Process operation timed out You might want to execute “gpgconf –check-options dirmngr” on the command line.

And of course if you go into the command prompt and try

gpgconf –check-options dirmngr

the system just hangs and you have to cancel with a ctrl-c.

If it is working however you should immediately see a response similar to

dirmngr:Network:C%3a\Program Files (x86)\GnuPG\bin\dirmngr.exe:1:1:

or something like that depending on how your system is setup or whether you are using windows or linux.

And so we know the problem isn’t with kleopatra. Instead it’s a problem with the gnupgp. Apparently the dirmngr part of the gnupgp isn’t installed automatically in some versions and so needs to be installed manually or maybe it was installed initially but is broken and needs to be reinstalled.

Pretty easy to fix.

For linux use the command

sudo apt-get install dirmngr –install-recommends

and if it is already installed first use

sudo apt-get remove dirmngr

then install it as explained previously

But if you have Windows just do a full reinstall of the pgp system by downloading from https://gnupg.org/download/index.html

After the reinstall you can test it if you want from the command prompt by running

gpgconf –check-options dirmngr

but in any case if the install was successful Kleopatra is now fixed as it won’t hang during startup due to an error in the dirmngr system.

I noticed a lot of people had this problem and no one had come up with a simple solution so feel to share it with everyone.