gdm_slave_windows_kill theory...

["Jason L . Buberel" <jason buberel org>]

Well, I just recently experienced a bout of 'X not starting problems'
after a long night of getting my cd-rw to work (it does, finally).
During that time, I had logged into my machine as user 'jason' (running
the latest gnome + enlightenment 0.16.2), but had su'd to 'root' in
order to do the cd-rw mastering.

After I was done, I logged out as I normally would. Everything seemed
fine.

The next day, I get back from work and notice that my monitor is at the
text-terminal (not gdm) login prompt. Hmm. Odd. I log in to find out
that I'm running at runlevel 5. Checking my /var/log/messages, I see the
following sequence:

Nov 22 23:51:50 taylor PAM_pwdb[1920]: (su) session closed for user root
Nov 22 23:53:07 taylor PAM_pwdb[626]: (gdm) session closed for user jason
Nov 22 23:53:07 taylor gdm[626]: gdm_auth_user_remove: /home/jason is
not owned by uid 0.
Nov 22 23:53:07 taylor gdm[626]: gdm_auth_user_remove: Ignoring
suspiciously looking cookie file /home/jason/.Xauthority
Nov 22 23:53:07 taylor gnome-name-server[1332]: input condition is:
0x10, exiting
Nov 22 23:53:12 taylor gdm[2063]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Nov 22 23:53:18 taylor gdm[2069]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Nov 22 23:53:24 taylor gdm[2075]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Nov 22 23:53:30 taylor gdm[2081]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Nov 22 23:53:37 taylor gdm[2087]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Nov 22 23:53:43 taylor gdm[2093]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Nov 22 23:53:49 taylor gdm[2099]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0
Nov 22 23:53:55 taylor gdm[2105]:
gdm_slave_windows_kill_ioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0

The last line is repeated about another 50 times before init just gives
up and stops trying to start gdm becuase of too many failures. I was
able to resolve the problem, but I have only a rough theory of what
cuased the problem, and I'm looking to you folks to help verify if this
theory sounds cogent:

Somehow, gdm became convinced that /home/jason was somehow the home
directory for user 'root'. During that time, gdm decided to write some 
data the:

/home/jason/.Xauthority 

file only to notice that it was not owned by root, thereby mucking
things up in general, and causing gdm to totally flake out and die, only
to be restarted by init over and over again. 

Does anyone have a better theory?

Thanks,
jason