Time was right (time is flying when you're having fun ;-) I upgraded the machine (aptitude update; aptitude dist-upgrade) reboot with latest kernel/xserver etc but still no go. Installed strace and output is added to this bug report
** Attachment added: "strace oem-config" http://librarian.launchpad.net/7080745/strace_oem-config.out.bz2 -- [apport] oem-config crashed with IOError in cleanup() https://launchpad.net/bugs/99211 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
