I've done something to really mess up my system now, but I'm not sure what. After rebooting my system something is terribly wrong with the terminals. Trying to open a terminal under X results in a screen without a prompt, just an unresponsive cursor block at the top left. In addition, any program requiring a root login such as Synaptic also fails. Some of them just crash, but under gnome, some of them give an error message "There was an error in creating the child process for this terminal" before closing out.

When I try to switch to a CLI terminal I've found more strangeness. The X server has moved from F7 to F2. The other F3-F6 terminals are still there, but switching seems more sluggish than usual. When I log in as root, an error message will pop up at random-seeming times saying "INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes". (I've also seen Id "3", if that's important in any way.)

Finally, I'm not sure how related this is, but my eth1 NIC is no longer being recognized. I want to keep the networks as separate as possible, so I have a second NIC card installed in each machine for direct networking between this and my Win98 box; the first card in each going to a hardware router for broadband access. I can still configure it to connect through eth0 and my router, and ifconfig still shows eth1 as being configured and recognized by the system. I just can't send anything through that card. It had been working fine up to this point.

There seem to be some error messages rolling by during startup, but they go by too fast to read. dmesg doesn't show module, network, or service error messages, and I don't know what log(s) to look in to find them.

As I said, I'm not sure what exactly I did to mess it up. I had been making a lot of changes up to that point. Here's what I was doing before I rebooted.

1: To free up some hard drive space, I went through and removed a bunch of packages that I didn't think I needed. I tried to be careful not to remove anything important, but it's possible I zigged when I should have zagged.

2: I was playing around with enabling and disabling services using the gnome services configurator (gui), as part of my continuing process of learning what I need to have running and what I don't. I may have disabled something I need to have running, or started something that messed things up. (I started more than I stopped this time.)

3: I did an Apt update just before rebooting. I think it only updated about a dozen packages this time, but one of them may have introduced a bug into the system.

I may have changed other things as well, but I don't remember exactly. I guess this will teach me to try to do too much at once. But I'd been doing so well up to this point. I'm still mostly a newbie at this. I don't even know where to begin in diagnosing this problem, and the lack of a console in the gui doesn't make it any easier. I've been thinking about wiping it all and reinstalling soon anyway, but I wasn't really planning on doing it this soon. I'd like to see if I can solve the mystery first before I go that far.

Can anyone help me here?

PS: I just noticed a thread with similar symptoms to mine here, but I just wanted to point out that my problem seems to be different. I compiled my 2.6.8 kernel over a week ago and I've been having no problems with it up until now, and I get the same problems when I go back to 2.6.6.

Read this while I read the rest of your post http://www.unixguide.net/linux/faq/09.24.shtml

Ok, I read that, but I'm not quite sure I follow what it says. I believe I normally boot into run level 2. It brings to mind another thing that's changed. If I manually shut down the X server to work in CLI mode, kdm will start it again a few minutes later. I know from experience that it will do that if the kdm auto-restart function is enabled, but I don't have it enabled now, so this is something new.

I guess that the Id number is 2 because X is now running in terminal 2. Or is it the other way around? One time I manually restarted X and it reloaded into terminal 3 instead, after which I started getting Id "3" messages.

From what I gather, it looks like I removed something I shouldn't have, which was what I figured was the most likely reason. Probably I just need to figure out what that package was and get it reinstalled. Any idea how to find out?

No, I'm stumped. You can find what run level you're booting to by reading /etc/inittab. For most distros to boot to a graphical envionment initdefault is 5 (or 4 on Slackware) or to boot to a command prompt it should be set to 3. Root can change the run level with the command init
init 3 should stop X and take you to a command prompt, init 5 will restart it.
Did you try doing what that page suggests, commenting out the line that starts with the number 2 in /etc/inittab?

Ok. /etc/inittab definitely says run level 2. I tried commenting out the 2 line from it and the only effects were that the error message went away, and the total lack of a tty2 if I shut down the X server. Everything else is still borked.

Reinstalling everything from scratch is starting to look more and more preferable. I want to install a second hard drive and reconfigure my partitions anyway. I'm just dreading it because I was just getting the system the way I liked it. It will take quite a bit of time and effort getting everything configured back up to the way it is now.

Thanks for the help.