Upon starting up my RedHat 8 system I received errors when X started trying to start up - these read INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes'

This had occurred after I had reinstalled KDE from my original RedHat Install Discs.

I did some searching and know that INIT is trying to enter run level 5 and start x but something is missing or wrongly configured. I also checked through the /var/log directory but cannot see anything specific beyond the "respawning" error listed above.

Currently I am unable to get X to start at all. When I run "startx" a badly
deformed X terminal starts with the mouse pointer being the only visible thing.

My question is how can I determine the cause of this OR how should I go about removing ALL traces of X, KDE, Gnome etc. allowing me reinstall these from scratch? There are bits and peaces of gnome and kde all over the place.

rpm -e says that they are not installed despite the fact that "whereis kde" or "whereis gnome" says that they are ... :?

Any ideas??? ! Thanks.

Try rebuilding your rpm database with the command
rpm --rebuild

With your hosed KDE installation, you probably want to make sure that kdm is not your default display manager, and that KDE is not your default desktop. I am not at my RH box now, so I can't point to the exact files you need to touch. You should be able to find them by poking at your home directory subtree and the /etc/X11 subtree.

Good luck.

Look in the /var/log/XFree86.x.log file for something with an (EE) at the start of the message.

I've run into that before myself; it usually means that something is not configured correctly in your X settings.