Ubuntu on USB flash drive - unable to lock ICEauthority
 

Hi,

I have been trying to put together a USB bootable Ubuntu drive for my laptop-less friend. I followed the instructions from pendrivelinuxdotcom to install the ubuntu-edgy.zip distro for persistent USB drives from a linux platform. My install goes (I've done it a few times now) okay and I can boot okay on multiple computers (graphics movements are a bit jumpy on my nvidia 6100 system but fine on the ATI system). I want to put some extra programs on the drive for my friend. I install several extra extra programs (VLC, Amarok, and most importantly MintDisk from the Linux Mint distro to auto-detect/mount windows drives). Everything seems fine... but within 24 hours a boot attempt results in a username prompt - if I dodn't set a password I'm stuck, if I do I'm stuck as well. nothing lets me in and the details say - "WARNING **: Unable to lock ICE authority file:"

Anyone know of this issue or have a guess as to what it might be that's causing it and a potential fix? I have been able to boot it half a dozen or more times before it gives me the impassable logon screen.

thanks