I reinstalled three times tonight, just to hopelessly get sound working. First two I chose gnome as my desktop at start up during the install, since I have no luck with sound and KDE, after the reboot I type root, then my password and it says invalid login, WTF!, I tried and retried, so I reformat and try again, same thing! Then I reformat a third time and decide to choose KDe this time, but can't even do that because it says something about no disk space left or something like that during the install, so FU*K it! I totally reformatted the drive with windows as NTFS, now I am starting from scratch to reinstall Slack 10. Any ideas why this has happened to me?

Whew! I guess a 100% complete reformat from windows deleting all partitions on my linux disk was in order, because now it installed properly with the reiserfs I wanted instead of the ext3 I had, and able to boot to gnome to top it all off!

no telling what happened.. maybe one too many to drink and you forgot the pass you typed during setup??

I don't drink, so the answer to that one is I don't think so

Maybe during setup you were on QWERTY keyboard but on another keyboard map at the login
step.

While reformating the drive is the usual technical solution for windows OS problems, in
Linux you certainly don't have to do that to fix something. Linux does not work like this, even
a reboot is generally not required. Take the habit to increase your patience limits, read manuals
and experiences from other users.