I have Fedora Core 3 installed, and have been using linux for 8 months or so. I wanted the screensaver to use the current user settings. I followed instructions in the Xscreensaver manual. It said to add xscreensaver-command -exit
xscreensaver &

so that it would use the settings of the user that would log on. However, I went to restart it and it said that the X Server could not log in due to an internal server error. I tried the rescue.. which doesn't help. I then forced a reinstall of the XMD package. It still didn't change. Since I can log into the failsafe terminal, I used gedit and removed those lines from my Xsession file. It still didn't work... now i'm just interested in getting gnome and/or kde to load. When the error comes up, the last thing it says is cannot exec /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession default . I tried a backup, but apparently that file wasn't copied to it. Any help is appreciatied.

Since you have removed the lines that caused the problem "startx" or "startkde (it might be "kdestart", I am not quite sure) should work.

Unfortunately I cannot help you very much, since I use Mandrake.

Thank you LinuxSeeker, but from the logon screen, the error still appears. If i type "startx" from the failsafe terminal, it says

Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.XO-lock
and start again.

I tried deleting it, however, it said that that doesn't exist (i used the rm command). I tried uninstalling xmd... but that's tied to kde... which is tied to many other programs. I burned all of the files on the drive to dvd the other day. However, i'm not sure if it's complete. When I type my name and password in the login screen, it still displays the internal server error.

I solved my own problem. lol. i was able to copy the X11 folder from the DVD that i used to backup and replaced the one that was in the /etc/ folder. Thanks for the help!