I have recently installed Suse 10.1 on a 350MHz Pentium 2 with 256MB memory and was delighted to find that in the main menu you could now start a new user session in KDE and place the current one on hold. I've tried this a number of times, always with the result that the screen turns black and the system appears to hang - the only option is then to turn off the power for a short period to reboot the system. Is this a known problem, and if so what do I need to do to make use of this facility?

I don't think you have the resources to run two KDE sessions for example.
You might try using a lighter weight window manager in both sessions.

I have exactly the same issue on Suse 10.0 64 bits, with an AMD XP 64 3200+ and 512Mb RAM + 1Gb swap... Never found a solution !

Willy

I don't have a problem doing it on my Amd64 laptop. It has 1GB of ram now, but I was able to start another session from the Kde menu when I still had 500MB.

Another way of doing the same thing is to log into one of the virtual terminals as the second user and use "xinit" to start a session on vt/8. You can run wmaker or startkde in the xterm.

Running the same window manager in two sessions as the same user may not be a good idea. Some apps like Firefox don't like it if the same user is running two sessions at once. Also, both sessions may be updating the same files in ~/.kde for example. ( This is the reason firefox will complain unless you create a new profile. Only firefox uses a different hidden directory for its files. )