HELP: Unable to login to computer??

[Bruce Marshall]

On Monday 28 May 2007, Jonathan Jesse wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> Slighlty panicing here.  This morning adept notified me there was an
> update to the kernel, kernel tools, vmware and vmware tools packages.  So
> did the update.  However my laptop locked up and I restarted.  Now when I
> go to turn on my computer everything appears to boot normally but when I
> sign in, the computer screen goes blank for a bit and then returns to the
> login prompt.
> I tried booting into the previous kernel, by selecting it in grub, but the
> same thing happens, also have tried reconfiguring X as I thought something
> got screwed up there, but no joy in solving the problem.
>
> Please help, I can login via the terminal login, but not through failsafe
> seession.  Any thoughts?

I believe I have had this same problem several times.

In my case (and probably yours)  something is farkled in 
your /home/<your-id>/.kde   directory.   One of the settings is messed but I 
never discovered what the problem was.

You could verify this by logging in as a different user.   (add a new one if 
you don't have something to login to.   (man  useradd)

If you find it works with a different user, then you have to bite the bullet.

Go to your home directory and:

mv .kde/   .kde.sav/

Then try to login again.   And you'll probably be ok.

You won't lose your desktop, but you will lose your KDE settings.

Some things like your addressbook and other settings can be moved back from 
the saved directory.   But that's another story.