On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Brian D. Ropers-Huilman wrote: > Mike, go to one of the TTYs (CTRL-ALT-F6), login, and try restarting the GDM: > > sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop > > then > > sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start > > Then switch back to the GUI console (CTRL-ALT-F7) and see if the GDM > will accept an ID after restarting. It might automatically take you to > the GDM after it restarts, I can't remember. Thanks for trying, but that did not go well! There definitely is something quite abnormal here, so your idea might usually work, but not this time. Stopping gdm went OK, but when I entered the start command, the screen went black, and that was it -- I could find no way to get anything back. The machine was still on but I couldn't ping it or connect in any way. The ctrl-alt-F? combinations did nothing. It was totally unresponsive, so I rebooted it. One funny thing was that the black screen did not mean that there was no video -- the monitor never went into power-saving mode. Rebooting did not solve my problem. When Gnome comes up to the login screen there is something very pathological going on. The login box in the middle of the screen is flashing on and off very rapidly (3-4 times per second). It always shows the name of the computer and and about once per second it flashes "unable to authenticate user" at the bottom of the box. I tried hitting ctrl-c and a couple of other things, but it did nothing. I can return to ctrl-alt-F7 and enter commands there. I also can start vnc and I'm using that now from my netbook, but I don't know how to make the vnc client work on the desktop when Gnome is down. At least now I don't have to worry about losing any work so I'll just reboot repeatedly, changing various things, and I'll see what happens. Any suggestions? Mike