On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Robert Nesius wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 9:59 PM, Mike Miller
> <mbmiller+l at gmail.com<mbmiller%2Bl at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>
>> I'm hoping someone here has run into a similar problem.  I lost power to
>> my computer and when I restarted it I couldn't get back into the X
>> session.  I'm running Xubuntu 9.10.  Basically, I enter the password, a
>> few things happen and it asks for the password again.  This continues
>> iteratively until I'm too angry and tired to continue.  When I go to
>> Alt-F1 console, I see this...
>>
>>
> I did some google searching and ran across this thread....
>
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5841400&postcount=6
>
> It struck me there were some similarities here that might apply... or
> perhaps not.  Worth a shot...
>
> I've run out of time so I can't chase this any further - good luck!


Well, that was close enough!  Good tip, but not quite the right answer. 
After seeing your message I remembered that I had run into this kind of 
thing before and the key has to do with some ~/.g* files.  This fixed it:

rm -rf ~/.gconfd

The only thing in that folder is a text file called "saved_state". 
Apparently that was messing me up, probably because gdm thought it was 
already running.

The ~/.profile file is for bash, so I'm not sure how that would solve my 
problems with gdm, unless there was something seriously wrong with it, and 
in my case it was fine.

Mike