When I boot up Mandrake 10, and I come to the login prompt. Only thin is starting yesterday there is no user available to login as. My user password doesnt work, my root passwoord doesnt work. When I go into FailSafe mode I can login as root and my password works fine. But when I go back to botting Mandrake in mormal mode I still show no users, and no passwords work. Any clues or advice or help. I'd hate to reformat it.

To clarify what I get at the login screen. Normal login box. User picutres is the defaullt picture. Cannot select a user. Only have box to type in password (which none work). Also have drop down menu to select between Gnome,KDE , etc...

Any clues..

Tis a long shot, but log in failsafe as root and do a

chmod -R 777 /tmp

and see if that helps. I had some issues where logging in as a normail user crashed right back to the login screen, and changing the /tmp permissions was what fixed it.

I guess at that point you could also check the perms on the user's individual home directory, make sure they're owned by the correct user and not root or nobody or something like that...

Good luck,

Didn't you by any chance happen to install MDK with top most security option at install time?

That option (paranoia - or smth like that) doesn't let you log into your box. It is made to work only as a server and I really don't know how can you administer it (maybe remote by ssh).
If this is what happened you might want to reinstall it - no other option available (that I know of).