I've seen this problem in previous posts, but have not been able to use those fixes to solve my problem.

The co-owner of my linux box (running Red Hat Enterprise ES 3, kernel 2.4.21-15.0.2.ELsmp) killed my session some time ago when I was logged in to the gnome desktop environment, and my gnome desktop has not worked since. When I log in using gnome, the screen turns black and I get several weird error boxes that pop up (with the red 'X' mark) but no text ever appears - just strange characters. Those same characters also dominate the menus, and it prevents me from doing anything. I have to log on to another terminal to kill my session.

I can log in to KDE just fine, and other users can log in to gnome with no issues, so this appears to be a problem with my .gnome subdirectories. I followed fixes suggested for similar problems, including deleting my .gnome* and .nautilus directories from my home (sometimes referred to as "reinitializing" the gnome desktop by previous threads), but when I log back into gnome I get the same black screen and weird characters. Reinitializing does nothing.

Another post I read suggested that the problem was with the path names in .profile, but I don't have a path in my .profile, so I guess that's not the problem. I also read something about creating a "dummy" user and comparing against those .gnome* files, but I don't really understand what this will accomplish.

I know there are others out there who have experienced this problem. Anyone have additional ideas?

Thanks!

Try renaming your ~/.gconf directory

mpoland; ? whom has root , u or co-owner? if c-o has u may have to request he correct ur input to programs & pc os with permissions to read,write & execute priviledges. check those priviledges .

I'm the root user also. Letting the co-owner have root privledges was my obviouls mistake (and it ain't that way no more). mhearn - Thanks for the suggestin on the .gconf directory. That did the trick!

Thanks a million!

mpoland; doing research prior to writing,executing always pays off. reading
readme,s,howto,s & any info invaluable. glad it worked out & u r welcome.
that is what we users strive for (helping each other) all the time.