I'm using KDE and it's a fresh install. It booted up just fine the first time. Now MDK stalls at "Loading Panel" on the KDE splash screen. What's wrong? I tried booting 2.6.3-7 and linux nonfb; both do the same thing.

Before this fresh install I installed the ati drivers and they built just fine. After rebooting it stalls at Loading Panel; so I can assume there's nothing wrong with X. So I gave up and reinstalled a fresh Mandrake and it's still stalls! Even though it's a fresh install. Please help.

Well I tried again and it doesn't just stall at Loading Panel. Like 5 minutes later it finally gets to the blue desktop and it just stops there; no icons, no start bar, just a blue background.

This happened to me with Mandrake CE so I decided to wait for Mandrake 10 Official and it's still happening.

Any help?

Well I think I found the solution...

After I left it at the blue desktop I was greeted with a prompt that said:

During the previous startup Knotify crashed while instantiating Knotify. Do you want to try again or disable aRts sound output?

I clicked on "Try Again" and was still left at the blue desktop.
I rebooted, reinstalled and chose disable auto login. I was now able to chose between KDE and GNOME at startup. Instead of KDE, I chose to boot up Gnome window manager and now it works perfectly; no more stall at startup on the desktop.