This is seriously bad practice. You should log out and then log in as a particular user before attempting to run "startx". No wonder you have so many problems! There are oodles of environment variables that aren't set properly if you su without a dash ("su temp" vs "su - temp"). You're going to make a mess of things.

Rather than try and be clever about exactly what the correct procedure is to su to another user, you should log out entirely and log in as the other user.

If this is the sort of stuff you've been doing, there's no telling how messed up your system has gotten. If I were you, I'd start with a fresh OS install. This time, make sure to never run any GUI programs as root.

Needless to say, don't do anything like that again. Besides the problems of running Firefox as root in another user's X session, you switched to root without a dash - meaning a lot of environment variables were pointed to the user's settings. And then when you ran firefox again as the regular user, you messed things up even more, because firefox doesn't start a new process if it has detected it's already running. Instead, it will open a new window with the currently running process...

Time to stop being too clever by half. Try using the software in the most basic way possible, as would be expected of a newbie. Don't use su at all with anything to do with X or GUI programs. You're not doing it right, and this is messing up your system in difficult to fix ways. Just do the more straightforward thing. Log out. Log in as another user. Don't use "su" with any sort of GUI programs. Keep it basic, and see how it goes.

You have to log in again for changes to /etc/groups to take affect. And you probably should use usermod instead of editing that file directly.

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Thank you for the response.

Thank you for the feedback. I haven't run any GUI applications other than Firefox as root, normally run startx as only lithoria, which I log in as, and with a single possible exception, don't know of any errors occurring on my machine. Do you think I should still do a fresh install?

I didn't know that. Thanks for the feedback.

Yes. You do not seem to be aware of the things you have done previously which have messed up your system. However, it is likely that you will continue to do things that will mess up your newly installed system. Some tips to help you not mess up your system in the future:

1) Never use "su" without a dash.

2) Never run any GUI program as a different user than the one which is currently logged in. Log out and log back in before doing so.

3) It is okay to "su -" to root within any terminal (console or graphical) if you wish to run strictly command line programs. But be very aware when you do so about ANYTHING that can affect any files in another user's home directory. In your case, it's probably best to immediately habitually "cd /root/" after every invokation of "su -" just to make sure.

I'll be honest-I personally never use "su -". I only use "su" without the dash and this has never caused me any problem. But I am also very conscious and aware of the potential pitfalls of "su" so I'm always careful to only do the minimum necessary when su'd to root.

Thank you for the tips. I'll reinstall Arch Linux.