Yesterday I spent a good four hours installing SUSE v9.3, updating packages, and customizing its desktop (the second time I have devoted a half-day to this). Using the system for the rest of the session was truly a joy, just as the first time.

This morning, just as the morning after the first installation, the system is inoperable. When the boot process stops, after I have given my user password, the desktop looks normal, except that the panel at the bottom is absent and the mouse cursor is immovable at center screen.

The boot log, as I watch it scrolling by during the boot, gives no clue to the failure; everything is "done", and there are no warnings. There have been no improper shutdowns. I am at a total loss to understand why this has happened TWICE, and how to repair it. Or, at a minimum, to understand what I must do differently on a third installation in order to have assurance that this will not happen yet again. I do not have many more half-days left in me to devote to repeated failures of this sort.

The installation was made in a single 40GB Reisner partition on an IDE HD, and a 1GB SWAP partition which resides on another HD. If more details are needed for analysis of the problem, please tell me what to add.

I would be exceedingly grateful for any constructive comments and advice. If the installation DVD has a way to repair or diagnose the problem, I would be grateful for pointers on to how to use it.

If the desktop comes up, but fails to load completely, there may be something wrong with the kde configuration. What you could do is to delete/rename the configuration in your homedirectory (/home/user/.kde). This will cause a default configuration to be created on next restart. Hopefully this will be functional.

Thanks much for your reply.

Before I installed v9.3, I had installed v9.1 (because it came with the book I bought). The problem did not appear with that release. I have done nothing differently with v9.3; the fact that the problem has appeared twice leads me to the conclusion that the new release has an intolerance (read: bug) that the earlier one didn't have. OK, that happens in the world of software.

More to the point: as an utter newbie with only anagregate operating time of one hour ( =;-/8 ) I don't know how to catch the system before it hangs and cause it tobring up a comman line instead of the desktop. If you will give me that clue, I will immediately try your suggestion.

Thanks again...

To get into commandline you can type a '3' on the initial grub menu. This will bring you into runlevel 3, which is the non-graphical mode in SUSE Linux. From here you can login to your user account and rename the .kde directory:
Then, you can start your KDE environment by typing 'startx'. This will create a new configuration and hopefully brings you to a working desktop. If it still fails, you may see some error messages appearing that can help us to find the mistake. If it works, you can logoff from kde, delete the backup 'rm .kde-backup' and on the next reboot you will be taken to the graphical login again. From commandline you can reboot with 'shutdown -r now'.

That is very clear and thorough; many thanks. I'll try doing this later today.