Gnome failed
 

I have been using Gnome 2.4.1 for a few years without a hitch. I just tried to login to a Gnome session and for the first time ever it failed. The screen flashed a few times and I was presented with the login screen (showing users to choose from) again. This loop continues with further attempts to login. The strange thing is that all other users can still login to Gnome OK and other desktops such as KDE work for me. I have changed nothing in my system recently so the sudden appearance of this problem is puzzling.
I use Mandrake 10 Linux.

I have not used MDK 10 for a very long time (using MDV 2007.1 here) and I do not remember much about the details of how that release worked. It is possible that your users Gnome configuration information has become corrupted.

The brute force (A.K.A. fast and dirty) solution would be to remove the ~/.gnome (or it may be ~/.gnome2) directory when logged in under another desktop environment (KDE?), but that may be overkill. You would never know what went wrong, and you would lose all your Gnome customizations. If you have the time and interest, you could rename ~/.gnome (~/.gnome2) to ~/.gnome-backup (~/.gnome2-backup) when logged in under another desktop environment (KDE?) then log in under gnome. If the log in succeeds, then something did become corrupted. Because you renamed your Gnome configuration directory, you can now restore one component at a time until you discover what broke, then you may only have to restore part of your customizations.

HTH,

Thanks a lot, I will try that next time it happens. Yes, the problem has just disappeared. I just tried to login and it worked. It failed at every other attempt since my post. A mystery to be sure. I will assume you fixed it with magic.

I'm happy it is working OK now, but I do not think I had anything to do with it :)