gdm fails to finish starting, why?
 

Suddenly in the past two days gdm fails to start completely. It brings up X, and just displays a clock mouse cursor on a black screen, and that is as far as it goes. It seems as though it will stay that way forever. I can switch over to a console, stop gdm and then startx with no problems, so I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with xfs, etc.

The only thing I can think of that might have caused it would be upgrading gtk, gtkmm, glib, or evolution (which I doubt is related). That is the only thing I have changed around the time period that it stopped working.

I have mandrake 9.0, and the latest 2.0 series of gtk/gtkmm. Everything works fine once I am in X using startx.

check log files in /var/log/messages /var/log/XF* and check dmesg