Hey there,
I've installed RH9 at a lab computer on campus, worked for hours on an assignment, and moved the drive home and booted up..
but I had wierd problems with X:
No windows or applets will show, no text will display, background is back, menu bar doesn't exist, etc.
And openoffice would insist on opening and asking me to register every time I started up and logged in with this user.

It doesn't really make sense.
So I logged in as root, and things display just fine.

I played around for a bit, and suddenly applets and applications would refuse to open. Grrreaat.
So I restarted again, had to log in as root (due to reasons above), and I get some error about having to add this strange user to my hosts.
It's a big string of numbers and letters.
After getting into a terminal window, I see the same string of letters and numbers as the computer name or something.

Any idea why it's doing this, and how do I fix this?

it used to display something along the lines of root:dlarmstr$ or something... now it has a huge string of numbers.

(dlarmstr was the system name)

Okay, I rebooted and tried to get the actual error message. And here's the system name: CPE00e0299f11c5-CM000039a50262

Error message:
Could not look up internet address for CPE00e0299f11c5-CM000039a50262.
This will prevent GNOME from operating correctly.
It may be possible to correct the problem by adding CPE00e0299f11c5-CM000039a50262 to the file /etc/hosts.

I... really don't know what to do.
And I'm still getting applet issues sometimes.

edit:
and when in the terminal, instead of displaying, "root@dlarmstr" etc
it shows, root@CPE00e0299f11c5-CM000039a50262"

GAH!
I'm starting to hate linux.