when i press the logout icon in gnome, it literally takes like 2 or 3 minutes for the dialog to come up, if it even comes up at all. if i press it a couple of times (like: "wtf? where's the dialog?"), a bunch of dialogs will come up a few minutes later, one after the other. this just started recently, after i have been doing a lot of "tweaking" of services and security files (inetd.conf, rc.inet1, rc.inet2, etc.) and trying to get my monitor to auto power off.

the logout seems to work okay after the computer has been logged into gnome for 5 or so minutes, making me think something might be going on in the "background" during start up, maybe because the system is "confused," looking for something i shut off, etc. i looked in .xsession-errors, but i didn't see anything there that jumped out as looking related. where should i look next?