I have a couple of questions that just *might* be related. (I'm running Mandrake 8.1)

1. I cannot log out from KDE, the screen just freezes. I have to go to a console screen and type:

shutdown -h now

Which leads on nicely to:

2. When I drop to a console screen it tells me:

id: Cannot find name for USER ID 501

UID 501 is most definitely in etc/passwd and has a name with it.

One time when I forgot about my log off problems and had to do a hardware reset, once I'd rebooted in failsafe and then normally, it had my user ID back in a console screen. However, the time after that, and since, it refuses to recognise me!

It doesn't stop me mounting Samba shares and being able to see them in Konqueror...

Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers,

Rob.

sounds wacked, try changing your passwd just for grins.

Ctrl_Alt_Bksp to bomb out of kde.

You might consider adding a new user and get rid of the one that's hosed or clean out the users home folder of the .??? folders

If I create a new user, does that mean I'll have the old NT problem that I won't be able to see all the programs I installed as the other user?

I guess you could cp it over to the new user and chown it

I would try it first and see if the new user has the same problem

In case anyone's interested, I found the solution to this. It's because the /etc/passwd file wasn't set up to give read rights to the "others" group. Changing the ownership to allow everyone read rights with chmod did the trick.