My distro, antiX, comes with Icewm as default desktop, but I installed Xfce to use it as the default. For some reason, now that I have installed Xfce and booted into it, I can no longer do anything at the logout window other than log out (all other options grayed out). I also can no longer suspend or hibernate by right-clicking the battery icon on the Xfce taskbar. This hasn't been happening until recently.

Another clue that something's wrong is that my user account isn't allowed to login from the graphical login manager, slim. If I enter my name and password, slim just goes back to its blank password screen, with no error message. The only way I can get into my account (that I know of) is uninstall slim from root and then log in to my own account from the command prompt. (I suppose I could have booted to runlevel 3 to avoid slim, but I didn't think of that till now.)

From Icewm, everything in the logout window is sitll available; the problem happens only in Xfce. If I'm right that this is a permissions problem, I don't know how to fix it.

the big DE's are using some sort of authentication keyring blahblah which is not working properly because of the way you installed it (i.e. manually on top of an existing distro) - my first guess would be to check out polkit, or policykit.

the first part of your problem can be avoided by giving your user permission to execute certain sudo commands (like sudo shutdown now) without entering a password, via /etc/sudoers. you might then have to adapt your logout dialog accordingly.

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I apparently have policykit. What exactly do I do with it?