i don't know what happened, how it happened, or why it happened, but i am locked out of X. I can startx as root, but not as my normal user. It gives me some bull about can't lock Xauthority or something to that effect. This happened one other time and i just wiped the hdd out and started over. i really don't want to take the cheap way out this time and lose all of my work that i have put into the system this time. I did already recompile the kernel. I thought it may help, but it didn't. PLEASE HELP ME.

In your home directory:
rm .Xauthority
If it's the only problem it'll work again.

i removed .Xauthority from my home directory. still didn't work. rebooted, still didn't work.

any other possible things that i can try?

Could you copy there the error you get? I know it isn't easy, but it'd help all people trying to solve your problem.

bash# startx
xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/user/.Xauthority
xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/user/.Xauthority
xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/user/.Xauthority

then KDE starts and tells me that something is screwed up, so i press Ctrl + Alt + Bkspce to logout. after you had me delete .Xauthority there is another error at this point.

cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing
cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing
cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing
cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing
cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing
cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing
cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing
cat: /home/user/.Xauthority directory or file missing

Now try with new, empty .Xauthority. To create it use
touch ~/.Xauthority
Then startx again. In case of errors, copy them.

i tried that and it still did the exact same thing. same errors were generated. it tells me that the DCOPSever cannot be initialized and therefore KDE cannot start.

Now it's KDE problem... Try with another window manager (create .xinitrc in your home firectory and put startgnome, startwindowmaker or any other command to run a window manager).
Are you sure your KDE is properly configured?

i have been using KDE since i installed slackware. i tried to install yahoo like another member told me, and then the next thing that happened was no more KDE. i'm not real happy about it. I know there has to be a way to fix it. I have to have KDE, i can't live without it.

i'm not sure what you mean by do i create it just like you had me create .Xauthority? and how do i "put" that command?
i am a fast learner, but i am very new.

To 'create' xinitrc, you can use any text editor you'd like. Make the file in your home directory, and simply type the lines Mara said:
startgnome
startwindowmaker (actually I thought it was startwm, but I don't know)
startkde

OR these lines are what I use:
#!/bin/bash

#exec kde
#exec gnome
exec gkrellm &
exec fluxbox

And that's it, I think anyway.

And copy the erros connected with DCOP, maybe it's quite easy to fix.

Try copying the .Xauthority from another users's directory over.

You could also try adding a new user to the system, logging in as them and starting up X.

try adding this line to the top your .xinitrc, it will generate .Xauthority for your display:

xauth generate $DISPLAY . trusted &

This exact same thing happened to me this morning. The problem was that ownership of my home directory was changed to root.root.

I don't know why it happened. I had su'ed in my home directory to run pkgtool (Slackware) to install gnucash.tgz that I had downloaded. gnucash wouldn't launch, so I used pkgtool to remove the package. The next time I booted, I couldn't launch X unless I was logged in as root. I experienced every error that the original poster did. Only when I got a permission error when I tried to rm .Xauthority from my home directory did I think to check ownership of my ~/.

FWIW
Terry

To use windowmaker, type wmaker.inst - it will add the relevant entry into your .xinitrc