LinuxQuestions.org - Help troubleshooting Fedora C6 boot problems

I have a server at work that I've installed Fedora 6 on and want to use as a mirror for another server. Everything was going well (finished install, got rsync running) and then I found that I couldn't get into mysql with the mysql-root user pass I had set earlier. This is not the problem, it's what happened immediatly prior to.

I had set the password using SQL, not mysqladmin, and I suspect I may have started mysql with the root user instead of the mysql user. Perhaps something important now has root privilages and the problem stems from that? I tried to clear the mysql-root password by starting mysql with --skip-user-table and spent a lot of time trying anything else I could think of, but never had any luck.

Then I restarted the machine for some reason. Now when the gui login screen comes up and I log in it hangs for a moment then there's a white error box that says something like "X11 not found. Please be sure you installed it". When I click ok, the screen goes black with a small shell window in the bottom right.

At this point whichever user I logged into the gui as is up on the shell window and I can interact with the computer just fine. However, I can't ssh in or out and when I scan it with nmap from another computer this server cannot be found. I suspect all the network communications are down. Perhaps when x11 failed it droped down to a lower runlevel?

There are two strange things durring bootup.
1) the cups daemon takes forever to start (1.5 minutes)
2) the hpssd fails to start.
But I can't see any connection between those things & x11.

Also. It did this once before about 3 weeks ago; I started up the machine & it somehow failed to boot up into x windows. But that time I restarted it twice and the second time it started up as if there had never been a problem. Rebooting has not made any difference this time.

This is not the kind of work I've ever done before and while I know enough about linux do get work done on a linux box, I have no idea how to solve these problems. Can anyone tell me how I could begin troubleshooting this?