X Window Manager Crashes
 

Symptoms

X window crashes when left idle long enough for the screen saver to kick in or when you select logout, halt, reboot. Can login and function fine until the one of the above is mentioned.

The system is set to go to console by default and when running startx it will load correctly. and operate fine.

System specs are

CPU :: AMD Athlon XP 2400+
RAM :: 1.5 gigs DDR pc3200 ram
HARD DRIVES :: 4 Hard Disks 2 IDE (Windows 2003 server) 2 SCSI Raid 0 (Slackware 12.0)
Gfx Card :: ATI AIW 9800 Pro
Other :: MegaTrends PCI SCSI Raid Controller
Mainboard :: Biostar M7NCD Pro

It was a little tricky to get Slackware to install on the SCSI raid hd's and not interfere with my windows install.

Edit:
For clarification I labeled system specs and added my mainboard manufacture.

Let me guess... Intel integrated video chipset?

I dont want to sound like and an a$$ or anything but you didnt read my system specs in the first post. Again my Vid card is => ATI AIW 9800 PRO. this has never happend before and now it is. nothing in my system has changed, I had slackware on my system last summer then I went to ubuntu then back to xp, now I am setting up the dual boot between linux and windows

Were you running Slackware 12 last summer or an earlier version? If Slackware was running without problems before I would guess that something may be awry with your xorg.conf file. Did you use the same set-up this time when you ran #xorgconfig? Or did you run #xorgsetup?
Open up a text editor and have a look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf

what driver are you using? error mesgs?

It was a straight out of the box install, the only differance that I will try is that I did xorgsetup instead of xorgconfig. it is the same setup as when i used it during the summer. No error msgs, just crash and wont go back to the console.

Perhaps xorgsetup incorrectly set-up your video settings. Maybe try re-running #xorgconfig or manually edit your xorg.conf file.
Good luck with this:-)

When you say no error messages, do you mean none were displayed on the screen? Is there anything in /var/log/Xorg.0.log or ~/.xsessionerrors that gives more info?

The screen hung with a black screen and a frozen mouse cursor. I could CTRL+ALT+DEL and it would reboot. But I didn't check those logs. Since I am on dialup I went to a friends house today and downloaded the ATI Proprietary Drivers for linux, installed them and so far it seems to be working good. I am going to let it sit for long enough for the screensaver to activate and if it still freezes up I will post the contents of the log file you requested to see if we can get this figured out.

On a small side note, even though it seems to loading and closing correctly for some reason it keeps changing my display res from 1280x1024 to 1600x1200 and I for see that it will get old quick when I need to change my display res everytime I log in to my computer

If it's not keeping the default resolution you have in xorg.conf but you can manually set that resolution, it may be that something is changing it. Do you run xrandr on anything like it?

no, what does that do? I know a little about linux but it is still a area of expertise i do not fully understand yet :( I am working on that now though.

xrandr lets users set screen resolution and orientation. IIRC, KDE (and GNOME) provide their own.

As an example, I like to run my screen at 1600x1200, but my wife prefers it to be lower. When she logs in she runs her screen at 1280x1024.

This is my best guess. You need to put your monitors vertical and horizontal fresh rates in. Most likely your monitor is not reporting EEID information.

man "xorg.conf" good info here.

put this in your monitor section.(make sure you have your montiors specs)

HorizSync 10-20 <--your values
VertRefrsh 10-20 <--same thing

aticonfig has its own way of doing this but it will work.

Okay it is still crashing when the screensaver kicks in, although I can log off normally fine. But the screensaver crashes it.

I will not continue work on this until tomorrow, as I need to get some school work done first and if that is done then I will address this. I will post the logs once the school work is done.

symatic, I hope by saying that the VertRefrsh setting is the "same thing" you merely mean that you must provide the correct values and not that they are equivalent to the HorizSync values, because they shouldn't be the same.