I'm a new Fedora user and I'm having a very frustrating problem with windows not appearing, or appearing but being "invisible". I'm not sure what the problem is, but I have seen the following error message sometimes:

Both of these modules are installed and present on my system though. But I'm not even sure if this is the root of the problem. Here are some examples of what I am dealing with:


1) When my screen locks after I've been away from my PC for a while, when I come back to it all that appears on my screen is the background image and top toolbar. No menu appears for allowing me to login. However if I move the mouse cursor around in the middle of the screen it will change to a text entry icon at a certain location, and then if I click and type my password I can login successfully.

So what I think is happening is that somehow the login window is there but not visible.


2) I've been installing VMware Workstation 8. During certain parts of the setup, I'll be asked to enter the root password to complete a particular step. After entering the password, nothing will happen. No additional window comes up (that I can see anyway). This always seems to occur whenever vmware tries to run the vmware-gksu application to execute the GUI code that required root access.



I'm pretty sure that this is not a VMware-specific issue though. I think the problem occurs whenever I am trying to run a graphical application with root access when I do not originally start the application as root. I've gotten around the problems with VMware by running it as root thus far, and every time I do the "missing" windows appear correctly. And I have no problem with windows not appearing in normal user space graphical apps such as Firefox or gedit.



Does anyone have an idea of what is wrong and how I can fix it? I've spent the better part of an afternoon trying to search for the answers myself and didn't really get anywhere. Thanks.