OK, not sure what I did, but.... I HAD Slack 9 up and running fine. On boot up, I modified the inittab to start fvwm95. Evrything worked fine for a few weeks, NOW..... when I boot up, the system stops a the "starting X" line. I can still however, open another character cell screen "alt+F7?" and login. Once logged in I can use the 'startx' cmd and everything starts up fine. I looked in the /var/adm/XF86****.log file and the last line being processed is for the mouse. I even reverted back to an old XF86Config file and the same thing happens. Not sure what I screwed up, but can't remember changing anything for the life of me that would effect this. Also, I use xf86config to create an entirely new XF86Config file with no success. Can someone point me in the right direction as to which files are looked and and in what order they are executed to start X. Again, no errors in the X log.

You don't modify the inittab to specify your default window manager. Run xwmconfig to setup your default window manager. Whatever you added to your inittab file, remove it.

Sorry, I think I did not explain the 'inittab edit' in my request for help. I edited my initab when I originally installed Slack to change the default run level (to automatically start X). Any other suggestion?

when using the command startx, the commands in the script
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc are run.

This is not always true; an over-ride can be in the user's home directory ~/.xinitrc

startx is a script not a binary too, just in case you didn't know, easy to check it out and see what's happening

You could make a /home/user/.xinitrc file to specify the startup of your default wm for that specific user....

Your inittab should point to runlevel 4:

# Default runlevel. (Do not set to 0 or 6)
id:4:initdefault:

this then looks at /etc/rc.d/rc.4

what happens next depends on this file, but if you were to put

# Not there? OK, try to use KDE's kdm session manager:
if [ -x /opt/kde/bin/kdm ]; then
exec /opt/kde/bin/kdm -nodaemon
fi

as the first choice, you can then go to

/opt/kde/share/config/kdm/Xsession

and check this file, but you should find

fvwm95)
xsetroot -solid SteelBlue
exec fvwm95
;;

in there, if so, then restart, and select fvwm95 from the kdm boot menu, and all should be well.

if rc.4 is using the gnome option I cant help, but you should be able to search around until you find the relevant conf file, I would guess gdm.conf