Lately I encounter a strange problem that never happens before. Hope someone can give me advice on how to check what happened or what went wrong with my Gnome environment. (kernel 2.6.20/ gdm 2.14.5/ Debian testing)

After the desktop environment has been initialized, sometime if I try to close an application such as Gaim or Firefox, it just hangs. Sometime I can switch back to console mode (ctrl + alt + f1) to kill the X. ; however, more often it just hangs (but I still can see the process keeping going. For example, the gaim history message becomes blank and occupies the screen, but I still can see the words that my friends type appear in the dialoge). No matter what key I press, there is no reaction. I am confused. Whilst checking syslog/ Xorg.0.log/ messages log there is no strange error. The only thing looks like "Failed to load module "GLcore" (loader failed, 7)" in Xorg.0.log.

What might cause such problem? Or where to check the root cause of the problem?

Thank you very much

I would kill the app instead of killing X, such as killall -9 firefox-bin. The macromedia flash, if I remember correctly, crashes my mozilla and firefox, mostly on myspace pages. The program will not exit unless I killall -9 it from a terminal.

I had tried that before. The reason why I `kill -9 [X PID]` is because I tend to `kill -9 [firefox PID]` or `kill -9 [Gaim PID]`. I kill most applications in the user space, but it still hangs; moreover, if I switch it back to Gnome environment (ctrl+alt+f7) again after `kill` those programmes, no longer I can switch it back to console (e.g., ctrl + alt + f1). Sometime I can not even switch to console by, e.g., ctrl + alt + f1. I have to even push the power off bottun on the laptop. I do not like this way to terminate the system, but I have no choice.

Thanks your reply. I appreciate it.