On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 1:58 AM, zxq9 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

On 06/22/2012 08:58 AM, Andrew Z wrote:

Hello,
i have the sl 6.2 on Toshiba satellite that worked fine. Last week when
i tried to boot it my x session hanged and i could never see my desktop.
Messages xlog and sessions files have nothing that gave me any clues. I
removed xorg.conf. No change.
Here is current situation.
If i login as root - all works. If i login as regular user the following
series of the events happens.
Login prompt -> some window pops up asking if i want to load default or
old config. Then all goes black and the only thing that responses is mouse.
Switching to tty takes good 3 -4 minutes . Yet top indicates no high
cpu  usage .

Some X managers can get crazy if they can't find the settings data they are looking for. It looks like your old settings aren't being found.

Are you on a networked file system, or are there any unique storage things happening at all? As in, do you have the root file system on one partition and /home on another drive or something?

The easiest way to test whether its access to /home or not (whether network, hardware issue, whatever) would be to login as root and create a new user, then see if you can log in as that user. If you can log in with no problem, then probably just a config file is corrupted and you can fix the problem by removing that one file and letting the X manager regenerate it.

Of course, "which file?" is a fun question, so the slow-going way is to move things like ~/.kde/ ~/.gnome2/ ~/.gnome2_private/ ~/.nautilus/ and other things like that (maybe even ~/.ICEauthority) one at a time and test to see if the situation changes any with each move. You'll move one at some point that makes everything suddenly better. My guess is moving ~/.gnome2/ will probably be that file -- but you'll have to re-do whatever custom settings you've done, which is annnoying but better than nothing.

Alternatively you could just create a new user, migrate the data you actually want to keep from your old home directory

The nuclear option is, of course, to just remove all dotfiles at once and log in the GUI to force it to recreate everything. But if you have anything special or any other programs than the desktop are storing stuff it would probably get wiped too, so this probably isn't wise (I'd be pissed if I lost my Ekiga phonebook, my bookmarks, everything in ~/.wine/, not to mention my KBreakout high scores!).