Gnome displays blank screen after login w/mouse cursor when networking interface up
 

I am running the following:

CentOS 5.1
Gnome 2.16.0
Kernel 2.6.18-53.1.13.el5

On a Dell E1505 laptop with a broadcom NIC and Intel 3945 wifi adapter.

When I start up my laptop, and either network interface is able to come up with a DHCP lease, and I successfully log in to GNOME, all I ever get is a blank graphical screen with a normal GNOME mouse cursor (not the "X" cursor). After about 3 minutes, a white rectangular box appears in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. If I move the mouse cursor over the box, the cursor changes to a text input cursor.

Thus far, waiting for up to 20 minutes, the screen remains in this state. I am able to <CTRL><ALT>F2 and login to a terminal session.

Can someone lend me some insight into what may be occurring? I find it interesting that this only occurs when a network interface is up.
-----------------------Additional Info--------------------------------
I logged in to GNOME and went straight to <CTRL><ALT>F2 and did a netstat -p | more which displayed several entries pointing to p10w15.geo.mud.yahoo.com:6009 and the PID was related to setxkbmap and gnome-settings. There were about 25 entries, most of which were for setxkbmap.
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Thanks,

Jeff

Gnome displays blank screen after login w/mouse cursor when networking interface up
 

I appreciate those who looked at this problem. I found that the company I work for had a Red Hat Cert engineer and consulted him, which led me in the right direction. I turned out that the problem was specific to the user profile that I use on my laptop. The resolution for me was to turn on the computer while connected to a wired LAN port and login as root instead of my user profile. Logging in as root was completely successful and I did not get the results that I did before. I then logged out (without restarting) and logged in with my normal user profile. This was then successful as well. I then shut the laptop down and restarted again, logging in with my normal user profile, which was again successful.

The problem must have had something to do with my normal user profile, and being the novice I am, I am not certain why the procedure I followed above worked. I can only surmise that logging in as root, then as normal user somehow had the effect of resetting one of my gnome-related user profile settings. I am very thankful that this resolved it!

I would still appreciate it if someone could theorize what the root problem actually was, only so I can understand what may have occurred from a functional level.

Thanks,

Jeff

apologies for bringing this old thread back.

jeff - one of the problems may have been disk space on the partition your /home or /var are mounted to.

I had the same issue. However, mine differed somewhat. I was not able to login as root or another user, as authentication would fail.

This wasnt the same running the system at runlevel3

I could change to anyuser inc root. I was bewildered as to why authetication was failing using gnome.

pwck - OK
passwd jami3 - Cannot rewrite shadow...what?

then i checked for .lock files, none existed.

therefore i cleaned out my /home/jami3/Download directory, tried again and I could do things...

weird? i have no idea how my drive got full...

Hope this helps out