I tried, it fried. I put a disk image of Ubuntu 8.04.1 back over Opensuse 11.1. I can't get rid the directories of the loopback crypto device (crypt file) created when I installed Opensuse. Anybody know how this is done? I haven't Googled anything.
Anyway, what fried in Opensuse 11.1 was a big insurmountable error on bootup; "Could not update ICEAuthority file /home/deekbeek/.ICEAuthority".
I couldn't use my Internet connection, because some error with the dcopserver program followed (Kinternet wouldn't start anymore).

I think the .ICEAuthority is a temporary file. Did you do something as root? Look at the ownership and permissions. AFAIK, you could log out as your regular user, log into one of the virtual terminals as root, and delete the file.

You might want to look for any hidden files not owned by you in your home directory. If a file is owned by root for some reason, you don't have permission to update the file. This can cause problems. Another thing to look for are stale .pid files in /tmp.

find ~/ -not -user <yourusername>

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If you don't have a crypto partition or file anymore, look for old information /etc. I think that the file is called /etc/crypto

Oh well. I've tried to delete the lost+found folder (I become root and do it with rm -R). When I do, it puts itself back when I reboot. The opensuse 11.1 crypt file feature puts this folder there, I can't get rid of it.
The only stuff I found, when searching for *crypto*, seemed to be ubuntu folders and files for setting up the same in ubuntu. The files didn't have dates associated with my trial opensuse 11.1 install.
I'm not going to try anything with the ICEAuthority file in opensuse. The bug is too disabling to want to work around.

Are you certain that the lost & found directory wasn't created by the filesystem being scanned and some orphaned files found? It shouldn't have anything to do with the crypt setup. If there is a problem with the filesystem or disk, a fsck scan is made. The lost & found directories is where the files are restored to when the inode structure was found but the directory entry is gone. Where there any files in it? You can use the file command to identify the type of a file if you don't have hints from the filename. Some graphical browers will use find to determine the filetype as well.

A crypt encrypted partition using dm-crypt will have header information. Are you certain the partition isn't still encrypted? If not you could check with "fdisk -lu" to see where the filesystem starts. You could have created a new user in SuSE and transfered the files over. Something in your home directory might effect the Desktop environment but not the installation.

Anyway, if the partition has stale header information before the filesystem starts, you may need to repartition the drive and start over. Either that or use dd to zero out the old information on the partitions. The latter would be dangerous, so you might as well backup what you want to save, repartition and reinstall the distro on this disk. My guess is that it is the kernel that notices the old information, and fsck.ext3 gets called because the filesystem doesn't match. Another possibility is that there is a problem with the hard drive itself.

A backup is called for in all of these cases.

I don't recall stating that I had an encrypted partition to banish. I have apparently one directory associated with a crypt file, which refuses to go away (the lost+found directory); it re-creates itself at boot-up even if I use rm -R as root to remove it. Even overwriting my Ubuntu installation with an IFL Terabyte backup of it won't rid me of that lost+found directory. Even booting Windows XP, formatting my Linux partition in Windows, then installing the backup Terabyte IFL image won't get rid of the lost+found directory. I never did create a crypt partition, just a crypt file (with Opensuse 11.1, not Ubuntu).

I don't believe that the directory has anything to do with the crypt file. It's use is for recovering lost files located during a filesystem check. Are there any files in it? It is possible that your drive is going bad if files are recovered after every reboot.

I have a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease, then. I had the arrogance to assume that because I only saw the lost+found directory when I worked with crypt files in Opensuse, that the directory was created only by that association. That would just figure. Here I am, able to install the latest Nvidia driver after a kernel update, but I'm still not boned up on Ubuntu directories (oh, I have of course dabbled in /etc/X11 and /boot/grub some...).