red hat 9 desktop freezes after booting into it
 

I recently had my system shut down because of a power outage. I am running red hat 9 and win2k. I have an AMD 1400 with 512 mb sdram.
After restarting the system, the grub bootloader menu comes up fine and win2k works fine. However, after booting red hat everything seems to boot up fine, all system devices are recognized, until right after I log in and the devices screen is done. Then when the system goes onto the desktop everything freezes. I am at the desktop but I have no icons on the desktop and the taskbar has all the icons except the up2date icon and there is no clock.
I can use the failsafe option to get at the command line and both keyboard and mouse work.
I am running gnome but even when I try and use kde as the desktop, the same freeze up happens.
I even tried to run the os's install cds and run an upgrade in the hopes that this might correct the problem and nothing happened. I also tried to start the system, thinking it might have been a hardware issue, by not having my mouse connected to the system but all it did was take me to a command prompt.
I 'm not sure if this is a hardware issue or if the xconfiguration is the problem, or could this be something else? I'm reasonably familiar with red hat and getting around in it, but this is the first time I have come across this situation.
Has anyone seen this problem before and if so does anyone have any suggestions or ideas where or who I might fix this problem?
Thanks
Mark

First thing I'd try is to boot to runlevel 3, not 5 (no X login). Edit /etc/inittab and change the line:

id:5:initdefault:

to:
id:3:initdefault:

Then reboot. You should get a login prompt. Try logging in here and see what happens. Try logging in as root instead of a normal user. Try looking in /var/log/messages for any errors. If login is successful, try running:

startx

from the command line, and look for errors. If graphical mode starts, then hangs, switch back to console mode using Ctrl-Alt-F1 (Alt-F7 to return). Again, in console mode look for errors on standard output and in /var/log/messages.

Hope this helps.

I logged in under runlevel 3, but the same situation still exists as far as the desktop freezing up, whenever I did a startx.
I checked under var/log messages and what was mentioned was something about the fb0-7 modules not being located. Apparently the fb modules have something to do with the XFree86 Project.
So I went and checked the XFree86 logs; and it looks like the module for my monitor(if I'm reading this correctly) is not being loaded. It says the [drm] failed to load kernel module " name".
My question then is: Is the module for the monitor not being loaded because the XFree86 modules (fb) aren't being located, or are the fb modules
not being located because the module for the monitor is failing to load?
Thanks
Mark