Since I installed Fedora Core 5 on my ThinkPad Z60m, I was always bothered by an annoying problem: more than 50% chance, when I loged into GNOME, I ended up with a screen with only wallpaper loaded, and there is no top or bottom desktop panel, no icons on desktop, no response to any keys except for ctrl-alt-backspace. If I killed X and restart GDM by switching to runlevel 3 and back to runlevel 5, I still met the same problem when I logged in. I had to restart my computer and the problem disappeared. But next time when I turned on my computer, this problem came up again! I didn't start any fancy programs when log into GNOME. The only suspicious thing is that I have a .i18n file in my home directory to use Asian language support so that scim input method is activated when log in. But I guess it should be OK. Logging into GNOME as root with English language often got stuck too. I had similar problem when FC4 was running on my Z60m, but it disappeared after I used FC4 for a while. However this problem is quite sticky with FC5. Anyone has any idea?

FC doesn't seem to run fsck after shutting down dirty, despite having the last number in fstab set to > 0. I also don't see any messages about rolling transactions from the journal forward or backwards when rebooting. So, whenever I have to push the reset button I immediately issue a:
shutdown -Fr now
to force fsck on reboot.