Gnome AND KDE hanging on startup!
 

A couple of days ago I found that GNOME would freeze when starting up. When I selected GNOME from the session type on the login screen, the GNOME splash screen would get as far as saying "Starting Metacity Window Manager" and then hang. This seems totally out of the blue as I can't remember anything strange happening while I was using GNOME the day before.

For the past few days I have been using the KDE, until ... today it too stopped working. When I select KDE from the session type menu and log in the KDE splash screen doesn't even show up, and the system just hangs. I think I may have an answer to the KDEs behaviour, as it froze on me yesterday and I was forced to shut the PC down manually, as even pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 wouldn't work.

I am now forced to use the Xfce desktop. Please help, I'm running out of window managers!

I'm using Fedora Core 3 with a Pentium 4 3Ghz machine.

Hmmm.... can we have complete system specs please? Have you looked through the X11 logs to see if there are any error messages? I have a hunch that this may be either (a) a memory problem, or (b) an issue with your video card, but without more info I can't even give you a guess. Any issues with running apps under xfce?

slight

Update: KDE is working again, but GNOME still isn't.

My specs:
3 Ghz Pentium 4
512 MB RAM
NVidia GeForce 5200 MX Video card
160GB SATA hard drive with 20GB linux partiton.

I haven't installed any extra nVidia drivers, but everything was working fine before this problem.

Remove your .gnome directory in your home directory . But before that take a backup of that. Sorry to say but you will loose your gnome configuration.

-Prasanta

Solved it! It was my fault. I left GNOME hanging for about half an hour and when I returned to my PC it had started up. It was hanging because I had selected "Save Current Setup" when logging out of GNOME before, and one of the prgrams I had left running was causing GNOME to freeze for a while when starting up. I'll know not to do that again.

I guess my KDE problem was just one of those things that happen to computers now and then.

Sorry for wasting your time and thanks to all for trying to help.