Gnome Problem
 

Its most likely PEBKAC I always like to start questions this way.

Anyhow I have Gnome and you can logon as root... and only root.. if you logon as a user nothing comes up at all. Anyone know what the deal is. No errors... u get nothing it acts like its loading.. no panels... no nice nifty load screen.. but all this happens when u logon as root.

How do you start X? Do you use gdm as a login manager?
Do you boot directly in X?

Maybe it's simply misconfigured, but I feel smell of missing permissions to connect to Xserver...

can you boot to console (or go with "init 3") and then run startx as a user?