Recently, I installed zim on a linux (Slackware 12.0) machine from source and received a segmentation fault while trying to start it. When I used
zim /home/me/Documents/notes/zim
the script started without trouble.
Somehow, zim seemed to need a directory for storing its notes as a default argument.
Sorry that I can't tell you more, searching on google for zim Perl "segmentation fault" and zim "desktop wiki" "segmentation fault" got me one message concerning an older bug http://svn.gregarius.net/demo/feed.php?channel=59 – and lots of irrelevant hits.