I've also had this problem very recently when GNOME would hang during the splash screen with only one ikon on the progress bar. I was given a couple of tips by members of my local user's group. They are : 1) from root do following bash rm /tmp/.X10-lock this worked for me several times 2) after a while it deteriorated to a black screen with a movable mouse pointer and that's all. The suggestion for this cure was : from root do following bash rm /home/yourhomename/.gnome2/session this worked also for a while and then it deteriorated even further (see below). How to get to the root? From your frozen GNOME hit CTL-ALT-F1 and this will get you into bash and you can then log in as root and do the above suggested bash commands. Eventually, that even didn't work and I was advised to do something which turned out to be disastrous so NEVER EVER issue the following from a root shell rm -rf $Home/* As I found to my bitter cost, this ERASED EVERYTHING including my data files on my USB memory stick and these were my day-to-day operating needs such as : e-mail addresses, snail-mail addresses and phone numbers etc., Firefox bookmarks, financial records and so on. I was DEVASTATED to say the least. Now, following a complete re-install of FC5 I'm glad to say I'm back in business and slowly recovering about 90% of my data from old files saved to Zip disk. Croombe Pensom
