I'm asking here because it is the best resource I know for knowledgeable people. The problem in question occurs on my Fedora 9 box and Fedora 10 netbook, while another person, Chris, has the problem on a Mandriva 2009 box. Whatever is causing it, that leads me to think that it's not distro-specific. Both of us are using kmail.
Kgpg sees and lists all the keys on my keyring. Setting up cryptography for kmail on the boxes in question is where the problem lies. KMail does not appear to be seeing the keyrings. When you try to select your key, the list is empty. If you type in the key ID and ask it to fetch the keys you get an endless back and forward progress bar.
As an experiment, on my F10 netbook I renamed the ~/.gnupg folder and recreated it by logging in. I did not copy my keyrings across. I then asked for my key to be imported, and that completed correctly. I then turned to KMail, but still my key could not be seen or used.
I think that that experiment rules out any possibility that I had introduced the problem by copying in config files and keyrings from previous versions.
Can anyone suggest further lines of enquiry? Thanks
Anne