Recently, whenever I accidentally enter a wrong password to login or unlock the screen from the screen saver, the X completely locks up. When I'm logging in, it's not a big deal, since I can just do Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and I'm back to where I started. But if the screen is locked (to protect my stuff from naughty little sisters
), and I press the wrong key on accident, everything's lost. I figured out that this has nothing to do with X itself. I tried booting into the console, and when I tried logging in and entering a wrong password, it froze up. There's no Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to press in the console, so there's no choice but to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and let it restart. The fact that the computer will still respond suggests that the kernel isn't crashing. Rather, the program that validates passwords must be crashing whatever it's running in, whether it's X or the command line. I have no idea what's wrong, but would it be possible to reinstall the program that checks passwords? If so, what is this program? Yes, I can be extra careful to avoid this problem, but it shouldn't happen and I want to fix it (it also opens the theoretical possibility for those same naughty sisters to make me lose my work if I leave the computer for a little bit
).
lasindi
