On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 00:22 -0400, Dwaine Castle wrote: > Experimenting with switchdesk, I changed to the XFce desktop which went > fine. But, I can't go back to Gnome, or to KDE, or to TWM. Switching back > to the "default" desktop didn't work either. Switchdesk suggested deleting > the .Xauthority file which I did but that caused an endless list of error > messages. GNOME now issues messages about not being able to start the > "Settings Daemon", > or the Gnome-clock-applet, > or loading OFIID, > or Bonobo - Warnings, > or the GdkPixbuf assertion 'filename != NULL' failed, > and Warning: destroyed file still being monitored. Try "rm ~/.Xclients" > X windows, for root at least, is now almost useless. I can only open one > terminal window within the GUI. For the record, This is a pure > test/learning machine and no data will be lost. I guess that I can copy the > configuration files from another account or do a reinstall, but I'd like to > know if this is a bug or something I did wrong. Running X as root? Not recommended. Preferred method is "su -" in a terminal window. Phil Phil, I've already zapped the .Xclients file and it didn't solve the problem. I was wondering if other people had experienced this problem. This installation should be clean the only changes are those made by up2date. It seems like the command is working for other people, so I've got a little research to. This is just a test box so I got nothing to lose by reinstalling the OS. However, I would like to fix this without reinstalling to OS, because I can't do that on a production machine. Yes, it is wrong to operate as root, but this is just a training machine. The only time I turn it on is to practice the stuff that I've read about -- the switchdesk command for example. Thanks for your help. Dwaine