I've tried Red Hat 7.3 and Red Hat 9 on a Sony Vaio GRT100P laptop. Both installs have exhibited the same problem:

--Running a Gnome session works fine

--Trying to login to a KDE session completely locks the machine during the inital KDE startup process. In 7.3 it is at the point after the Window Manager is started. Not sure what the icon on 9 denoted.

--The machine is locked to the point where it can't be accessed locally or from other machines on the network....can't even ping it. I have no other choice but to lean on the power button to shut it off.

Running an NVidia card, and the driver seems to be working fine...not sure if this is causing the problem.

I should also note that on the initial Red Hat 9 load I also installed VMWare to run Windows 2000 server. This load appeared to go fine, however, when 2000 tried to start in the Virtual Machine it locked the box up in the same manner as the KDE login....completely inaccessible on the network....hard power down.

Any ideas on debugging this? Something I could monitor remotely while doing KDE login to get an idea where it is crapping out? Any suggestions appreciated.

One possibility is memory problems. The smaller gnome can run and the larger KDE cannot.

How much memory do you have and how large is your swap partition?

Similarly, running Windows on top of VMWare has to be a memory hog. So maybe memory size and swap size are your problem there also.