gnome fails to load on login after bootup - unless bootup first in win xp
 

I am running fedora core 4 with kernel version 2.6.11-1.1369 on a new laptop (64 bit architecture, pentium 4 processor - let me know if additional specs are useful). The system had been working very well for a few weeks. However, in the last two days I encountered trouble logging in after booting up - gnome (ver 2.10.0) startup seems to hang (I have mouse control, but none of the loading icons show up no matter how long I wait). This happens for all users, including those using default start-up scripts. I am able to access the failsafe terminal and can load any programs I want from there. I don't have kde or any other desktops installed to test. I have, however, been able to login to gnome without trouble if I boot up first in win-xp and then reboot to linux. I have also noticed that on shutdown I get an "NFS locking failed" error. I had been getting this error intermittently before but without any troubles on the following login. I have been wary of disabling NFS since I don't know how to reenable it if it's needed for my partition that's shared with win-xp. The only changes that I made to the system immediately before encountering this problem was installing firefox 1.5 and changing the sound driver used in xmms and mplayer - both changes seemed to work.

I am very new at running my own linux system - so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

That is a really weird problem. I really do not see how NFS would be causing you problems. You should not have any problems disabling it.

What yum repos are you using? I had a nasty little problem occur when a certain yum repo was enabled. (Of course I forget which one it was.)

Thanks for your reply! I have the following yum repos enabled:

extras
fedora-extras
fedora
fedora-updates

I also occasionally use:
livna and freshrpms

though these are disabled by default.

I have read that you should not have livna listed regarding your auto updates. That might have been the problem.

I'll be honest with you. I would probably reinstall at this point. I have never heard of a problem like this one.

Your windows partition should not be an issue. Are you mounting the XP partition at startup?

I disabled NFS but that doesn't seem to change the startup problem (NFS locking error on shutdown disappears). The shared partition is mounted at startup. I will probably continue playing around a little more before reinstalling though since it doesn't take that long to load windows and then reboot...

Are you booting to a GUI or command line??

I'm clueless to be honest. Never had a problem of this nature. What type of video card od you have? Have you installed the drivers for the card? Not sure if it would really matter though.

Using both livna and freshrpms is generally not recommended as they have different packaging conventions, so I guess it's possible that a conflict there may have caused the problem...