Ok - here's the deal. I have Slackware 9.1, and normally use Dropline Gnome (all up to date). However, there was a program (KVideoGen) which I was trying to use, and it wasnt working in Gnome (some problem with KDE libraries) so I thought that the smylinks might be automatically created if I was using KDE.

So I logged out, changed session to KDE and logged in again. This worked fine (or as fine as KDE can - 3.2.2 doesn't like my sound...). Then I logged out of KDE, changed the session back to Default, and tried to login again. The login screen disappeared, but then it didn't show the Dropline Gnome splashscreen, and then went back to the login screen. I changed session to GNOME and the same happened.

So, I drop to command line and run init 3. I then login as root, run the dropline-installer, and select install to reinstall all the Dropline packages. Then, figuring that some of these might be out of date, I run swaret --update && swaret --upgrade -a && swaret --dep. I reboot, and try to run GNOME - but the same thing happens.

Are there any logs I can look at the check out what is going wrong? That was of course a sideline question to the main one (which, although implicit, was quite obvious) - How do I get GNOME to work?

I'm currently using BlackBox.

EDIT: The list of ones which don't work has now been expanded:
GNOME
OpenWin
Enlightenment
Afterstep
WindowMaker reports a Segmentation Fault (related? perhaps its more informative than the others and this is the same error? what would this mean? how could i certify/fix it?)
Failsafe GNOME

Are there any libraries or something that these share?

ok - something new. if i login as root, it works fine. but i dont want to be root. this implies there must be a permissions problem somewhere, but i cant work out where, without knowing where the gnome logs would be found. anyone?

rm -rf /~.gnome* ~/.gconf* ~/.metacity* .themes* .icons*
unless you run X as root i don't know what could have happened or it might be a dropline gnome problem

i fixed it, but im surprised how. this is how i did it:

from console, i tried startx > xlog to log the output of startx (which is full of errors)

it said i didnt have permissions to create xlog. in my home directory. i tried touch newfile, rm someuselessfile - none of it worked.

surprised, i su, then chown -R drigz /home/drigz/

exit, startx - guess what - it works.

the question is, why did i lose permissions to edit my home directory? anyone?