I've now reached the stage where I have to ask for some help with this. With a fresh install of FC5, and after updates I found, as I have on previous occasions 2 versions of librsvg2 installed, which create conflicts. After an horrendous job removing the earlier version, I now find that gdm won't start, and the pid in /var/run/gdm.pid is missing. I know it was there when I installed this FC5 because I checked post install, after using gdm to login to Kde. Since the updates, and librsvg2 problem, I've been having to bootup into init3, and startx, which has logged me into gnome. Gnome regularly locks the screen, and I was getting a plain white box here to unlock the screen, but after I had forcibly removed the offending librsvg2, the screen lock box changed to a nice blue one, so at that time I presume that gdm was now working again. So. I logged out of Gnome and shutdown from the text login, proceeded to reboot, this time as normal, and expected to see gdm, but no joy. All I get is a black screen, the mouse pointer, and a rotating blue thing, like its waiting for something to happen, and doesn't. Is it possible to recreate the missing gdm.pid in /var/run somehow? Thanks. Nigel.