I just finished installing Vidalinux on my system and logged in for the first time as root and i got a black background with a shell and xms running instead of Gnome. The i created a new user and logged in as that user but i still get the same interface instead of gnome. Can anyone help me please? Thanks in advance.

Are you logging in from a console session? I'm assuming that GNOME and X itself are in fact installed (if not, that would be your problem right there). What command are you using to start X? If startx, try gnome-session instead.

Although-- I've been past the Vidalinux site, and on the front page is a long request for financial support from the userbase, so it seems quite likely that you're using the download edition rather than a retail disk (since if people were buying the disks, the dev team of two wouldn't be desperately begging for money to continue development). And the Download Edition does not install GNOME automatically:
I see that Vidalinux is based on Gentoo, so I assume that the internal configuration is similar. As I use Gentoo, I can tell you what is probably wrong, assuming that the Vidalinux devels have not mucked about with the standard location of Gentoo config files.

Assuming both an X server and GNOME are installed-- and specifically, manually installed by the user, rather than automatically installed by the installer-- the default behaviour is to boot to a console login. Editing of a system configuration file is needed to either change this behaviour, and/or to configure the startx command so that it starts your preferred session type rather than the default.

To boot to a graphical login, from which you can change session types (assuming, again, that X and one or more DE/WMs are installed):

1) confirm that GDM (the GNOME display manager) is installed. You should be able to do this with the command emerge -pv gdm in a console as root. The "-pv" stands for "pretend" and "verbose", which means that it will only pretend that you're going to install-- but won't-- and will tell you all the details of the pretend install (verbose output).

If the output begins with
[ebuild R ] gnome-base/gdm-version-number

then GDM is installed (the "R" stands for "reinstall"), but if it begins with

[ebuild N ] gnome-base/gdm-version-number

then GDM is not installed (the "N" stands for "new install").

If you get a very long list of programs that would be installed in order to install gdm, then either X or GNOME (or both) are not currently installed, which would be your problem. You can't run GNOME if it's not installed, and GNOME can't run if X is not installed.

Whether or not GDM is installed:

2) type nano -w /etc/rc.conf in a terminal (still logged in as root). Nano is a console-based text editor, and it is part of the default Gentoo system install, so I hope that Vidalinux installs it by default also. The contents of the file rc.conf will appear. You want to change these sections down at the bottom/end of the file (this is my rc.conf):
.

The first section:
is one of the two steps needed to set up a graphical login at boot. If GDM is installed, and you want to use it, remove any "#" sign from in front of this line

DISPLAYMANAGER="gdm"

(known as "uncommenting the line"-- the "#" sign causes the line that follows it to be seen as a comment, not a command, so it is ignored by the system until this symbol is removed)

and make sure that the DISPLAYMANAGER is set to "gdm".

The second section
controls what happens if you just type startx in a console login. Doing so will start your default session type, and this is where you define that session type. As you can see, my default session is Openbox, but you don't have that, and you want GNOME anyway, so change this to read

XSESSION="Gnome"

again, removing any "#" symbol that may precede the line.

When you are done, save the file using CTRL+O (that's a letter O, not a zero), and exit nano using CTRL+X.

This will take you back to the command line.

If you now want to set up your boot services so that GDM starts at boot, you would then type (as root) rc-update add xdm default. This will add the XDM service--which you have just configured to start GDM-- to your default runlevel. So when you reboot, GDM should start automatically, giving you a graphical login which allows you to choose among whatever session types you have installed.

If you don't want to use GDM, but prefer startx, just reboot, and when you type startx after logging in, GNOME should start, since you have configured it to be your default session.

By the way, this review of Vidalinux on Linux.com is quite scathing-- it appears that even if we were to get this issue sorted out, it would be far from the end of the issues you will encounter. You might want to consider another distribution before going much further... try http://www.distrowatch.com for information on the many other distros available to you. IMO, if you're using this, you might as well just use Gentoo, as the install may be more complicated (and longer), but the documentation is better, so at least you know what you're doing.

Hope this helps.