stuck at login screen kubuntu 8.04

[Sundar Nagarajan]

Juan Kawada wrote:
> sorry, I meant 8.10
> 
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Juan Kawada <juankawada at gmail.com 
> <mailto:juankawada at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     My friend's dell inspiron laptop is stuck at the logon screen.  He
>     did a dist-upgrade through adept, and has not been able to logon
>     since then.  After you type n the password, the screen blinks some,
>     and then returns to the logon screen.
>     I tried a console logon and startx but it produced the same result.
>     Any ideas? I saw some others with this bug but no solution so far.
> 

 From the fact that a similar effect is seen on the console, it seems to 
look like login itself is failing . Maybe some problem with the 
dist-upgrade left a key library unusable - like libc or in some other 
way is preventing login authentication from happening.

I can't think of a solution, but perhaps someone else can suggest ways 
to fix a failed libc upgrade or a failed PAM upgrade?