On Tue, 23 Dec 2008, Chuck Cole wrote:

> The "upgrades" I've been getting from Microsoft over the last year seem 
> to break various features of legacy stuff...

I know.  But it also happens in the GNU/Linux world.  I just had a note on 
my Ubuntu desktop machine telling me I had to reboot (that is not good 
because I should almost never have to reboot and it is a big hassle).  So 
I rebooted and Gnome would not come back up.  It said that it couldn't 
find pulse-session.  Well, that's because I uninstalled it. 
Unfortunately, the uninstaller didn't know to delete one of the X11 
initialization files.  I had no idea what was going on but I happened to 
know a few tricks that I learned recently.  So I started with...

Ctrl-Alt-F1

...which gave me a text-based command line.  Then I did this...

lynx http://google.com/

...and googled a bit.  This led me to the conclusion that I needed to do 
this...

sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
sudo shutdown -r now

...which solved my problem.

It was a small problem, but the effect would have been devastating if I 
was lacking just a little bit of knowledge.  An newer newbie would have 
had a heck of a time.

Mike