Thanks, Andrew. I will check those possibilities. A problem
with the graphics drivers seems likely in that I get the same
result with my default (test) user as with my own personal login.
However, logging in as root gives a perfectly normal Gnome
screen.So it may be that somehow a permission got changed.
What's odd is that this all happened in the course of moving
the cursor around and the abrt error message suggests it was
moving the cursor across the clock that caused the problem.

I'm not sure if my previous email came out as intended as it
was done on the faulty machine.... I hope the abrt-cli messages
were readable

Thanks again, Malcolm
________________________________________
From: Andrew Hart <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 12 October 2016 14:43
To: MAH Maccallum
Subject: re: problem

Gnome restarting during login can be sometimes caused by users not being able to write to their home directory.  Have you checked that?  You could Ctrl-alt-f2 for a console login to test.

Another thing that has caused it for me is graphics drivers, did you upgrade/change that?



>I have a recently set up SL 7.2 using Gnome. Something very strange happened while trying to use the mouse and now only root can log in and get a sensible screen. All other users, including newly->created ones, just get a dark screen and a restart. Here's the output from abrt-cli.