gnome-session fails: permissions

[Marcus Harnisch <marcus harnisch gmx net>]

Hi *,

After installing gnome-2.4 I am stuck. I assume my problem is
relatively simple to fix, I just don't know where else to look.

OK, here's what happens:

I start X and exec gnome-session from .xinitrc. First thing I noticed
is there's no splash-screen. Desktop background is black, and all
Nautilus icons are kind of generic 'dog-eared sheets of paper' (I
assume from stock-icons). The panel geometry is roughly 200x12. The
fontsize of the icon titles is about 1 (one) pixel -- antialiased,
though ;-)

pop-up windows have a completely screwed up geometry (widths are
sometimes in the range of 32000, as Xfree tells me in its error log).

Things seems to work somehow, though, its just that the display is a
complete mess.

The same procedure works great when I start Gnome as root! So I guess
I have a permission problem.

When I exec 'strace [...] gnome-session', the only permission related
problems I could find are bind()-calls trying to open privileged ports
right after accessing /etc/rpc. As root I don't get these of course.

Any ideas? Pointer to a FAQ?

Thanks a lot,
	Marcus

PS: strace files available upon request.