This is absolutely bizarre.

I'll boot up the machine into runlevel 4 and log in to my user account via kdm. My xfce4 session appears to start up correctly; everything on the desktop and tagged to autostart appear to actually come up. I can even launch 1 application. Sort of. The application's window will come up with the appropriate frame, but I cannot move the window or otherwise interact with it in any real fashion.

I can then hit ctrl-alt-backspace. When the kdm server login screen comes up, I can then log into my user account (just like I did after bootup) and everything in xfce works like a charm.

Has anyone else seen this wierdness? Yeah, I've got a work-around but it really bugs me to have to cycle the X server like that to get things to work.

I had something similar happen that was fixed by removing the xfce session caches somewhere under ~/.cache somewhere I believe, I think a hard restart left corrupted session info that it kept loading. Not sure if thats the case here but might be worth a shot

This happened to me, I think.

Open a terminal and start xfwm4 like this:

Log out and make sure to tick the save the session for future logins.

Login again.