HI
So heres the story, about 2 weeks ago I logged in to gnome to find things very messed up. I could not use any text feilds, workplace switcher was missing but when I right clicked where it should be i would get its propertys, no windows would have borders around them, and alot of other weird stuff was happening. No one could tell me what was wrong and I could not find anyone else that was having the same problem. So I reinstalled linux (RH9) and everythings been going great since then... untill now. I logged in today to find my desktop effectivly missing. The background has been changed to blue default color and when i right click on my desktop i get no menu, when i drag the mouse over it i get no selection square, and all my desktop icons are gone. All my programs still work fine, the taskbar works fine, but the desktop itself does not respond to anything.

If anyone knows whats going on here that would be great.
Thanks

what about ram-size, swap-size, harddisk and distro???

Umm..well i said it was RH9 and does the rest really matter? Well im on a athlon 2200+ 256Mb ram 30Gb hard drive and redhat made a 509Mb swap partition when i installed it.

This might be useful tho, when i log into gnome as root everything is fine.

It's been some time since this was active, but it sounds like it could be a gconf problem. Try mv'ing ~/.gconf and ~/.gconfd to ~/.gconf-backup and ~/.gconfd-backup and start Gnome. It should be like the default setup (in other words, any changes you've made to panels, backgrounds, etc will be gone). If so, then it probably was gconf.

Suggest you login with another window manager or a live cd and delete the contents of the /tmp directory.

I got similar symptons once and this sorted it for me.