Red Carpet and Synaptic crashing

Hi, I'm running SuSE 9.3 Pro on a P4 2.4Ghz with a 200GB HD and 1024MB RAM. Today, for reasons I can't seem to find, both Red Carpet and Synaptic are crashing. When I start up RC, it tells me that no daemon is running and asks if I would like to start one (I choose "connect to this system") which I do. Then right as it's loading up all the channels, it tells me it lost its connection to the daemon and then crashes. Similarly, synaptic crashes as it is loading up the package lists. I've tried starting both programs via terminal but no error messages show when the crashes occur. Has anyone else had this problem? If so, what did you do to fix it? Thanks in advance, Jack Brooks