NFS lock trouble

[Steve Severson <steveseverson earthlink net>]

I have been trouble shooting a problem that appears to be the NFS lock 
problem. I have Red Hat 8.0 and had no problems until about 2 weeks ago. 
My network is small, two Linux boxes and 1 Windows. I should point out 
that I am new to Linux and sometimes get confused on using commands or 
where to edit something, especially when a string of letters is used and 
I should know that I need to enter data specific to my configuration. I 
installed tight-vnc on all three systems setup NFS on the Linux boxes 
and started using Red Capret update all at the same time, over a 
weekend. It wasn't until one of my daughters went to log on to her 
session that we knew that there was a problem. I wouldn't be able to say 
which of these, or ever if one of these caused my problem because of the 
time frame that htey were all done in. The situition is that on one of 
the systems only root can log on to Gnome (this is the only box that is 
currently set up for Red Carpet). Any new accounts can log in to Gnome. 
And on the other Linux box, which has NFS, there are no log on problems. 
I should not say that we can't log on, we can, but you get no useable 
desktop. Just a lot of meaningless boxes. Now if you log on from a 
remote terminal using VNC the desktop is useable but you get a lot of 
error messages about metacity, nautilus, gnome and gconf not being able 
to access the users /.gconf. I have focused on NFS at this time and 
removed all data from etc/exports and etc/fstab. I have stopped and 
restarted locks and mapper and also tried killing the NFS locks, before 
I read your article. The part where you say not to you don't say the 
consequences for those that already did.
So I wonder where do I go from here, I have tried the advice in this 
article, the advice from the gnome forum ( I have an issue out under 
desktops 'Gnome out to lunch Red Hat 8' ).
Nothing has worked for me, I have set up the user.+ /var/log/user and 
can't seem to get it right as on boot it says + is not valid, so I 
replace + with my user ID and now it says on boot that I am not valid. 
There must be something that I am not seeing from this string that needs 
to be added. Also I have been unable to get data from the sanity checks.
My current gconf info:
GConf2-1.2.1-3
GConf-1.0.9-6
I need help!
Thank You!
Steve