Problems starting gnome

[mas <mas codix net>]

Please help!

On coming into work today, one of our workstations is having trouble
starting gnome properly. It's running a vanilla RedHat 7.2 install on a
Pentium II (I think). When the user logs into the gdm prompt, gnome
appears to be starting (i.e. the welcome screen appears and the icons that
say what it's doing appear, or at least some of them) but the desktop that
comes up after that has only a background, no icons or any of the other
desktop paraphrenalia. Also, only the center button on the mouse works to
bring up a menu.

As far as I can see, nothing on the workstation has changed since
yesterday, and there are no suspicious messages in the log files. There
are a few of the 'Fatal X error' messages, but importantly none from the
most recent reboot, which displays the same symptoms. There was also a
message about ext2fs mounting an unchecked filesystem, but after
unmounting it and running e2fsck on it that message has disappeared.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks very much.

Michael