Gnome hangs and accepts no input when I select log out from the appropriate pull-down menu. I am running it on Fedora Core 3. I actually have to control-alt-backspace, or log into a virtual terminal and kill gnome. Furthermore, when I try to log out, Gnome stops responding to mouse or keyboard input. Some other programs remain responsive, but not Gnome. How can I fix this?

I should point out that this occurs when I actually click on the log out menu item in Gnome. Until that point, Gnome is happy. After I click on it, Gnome becomes unresponsive. I should also point out that Gnome has also become (temporarily) unresponsive while trying to resize a window. After about 2 minutes or so, it became usable again. But when this log out problem occurs, it remains completely unresponsive and must be killed.

Thanks!

A possible solution would be to delete the account in which this is happening - back up the files you need first - then create a new account for that user.
This is just a guess, but it may be something to do with gconf locks which aren't behaving right. if so, recreating the account as above - or deleting the offending /.gnome and /.goconf directories should help. You may want to wait for more input first, I'm pretty new to this myself.
hope this helps, and good luck.

Try creating a new test user and check if the problem occurs with that user, if it doesn't that the problem is definitely something to do with your personal gnome settings and you may need to get rid of your .gnome (or .gnome2) and.gconf directories. Make sure you back them up first.