Ldd is your friend.

I spent several days tearing my hair out over failures of installing rhythmbox on my debian system.


Then I ran ldd on one of the troublesome libraries and discovered that a library in
/usr/local/lib was being called. It turns out that I had compiled some version of gnome years ago and put it in /usr/local/lib, which was conflicting with the much newer gnome libs in /usr/lib.

One "sudo mv /usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib.old" and I was good to go.