gdm crashed and won't restart

[Riko Wichmann <Riko Wichmann desy de>]

Dear all,

I have a very strange problem. I installed garnome2.8.2.1 as local user 
on my laptop running xfree v4.4 and the garnome gdm as display manager. 
For some time, everthing seems to be working fine, but at some point 
something goes wrong, and I'm not sure how or what. I haven't installed 
anything new in the last few days or changed my gnome configuration.

The I noticed today, that I could not run a few programs (for example 
grdesktop) and entries from the gnome desktop preferences anymore. No 
error message or anything. just nothing happens. After I logged out, 
apparently gdm had crashed and tried several times to restart until a 
blue screen appears saying something like that "the displayserver has 
been shutdown 6 times during the last 90 minutes ... something is wrong 
... wait 2 minutes before trying again ... "
Needless to say, that after that crashed continued ...

also changing the display manager to xdm didn't help, even though also 
that worked before. With xdm I get as far as the garnome splash window 
appear, but no services seem to start and whole thing crashed.

That has already happened a few times, and so far I could only recover 
from that by removing the gnome dir completely and compile again from 
scratch ... not a very practical solution.

I suspect, that maybe some gdm/gnome temporary files remain after the 
crash which are reloaded and contain the faulty config. However, I have 
no idea where to look.

Any idea would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

	desparately, Riko