greeter/login problem

[mike james]

I recently upgraded from edgy to feisty using the upgrade button.It took 
about 6 hours and happily restarted, without any problems.

However after the restart it comes up with the round swirly thinking 
cursor on a black background. I did ctrl+alt+backspace and the cursor 
vanishes for a second then back, but no login window. If I tap the power 
button it does a proper shutdown with the splashscreen and everything.

I then tried booting in the recovery mode, which worked fine and booted 
into root automatically. After briefly browsing around the filesystem it 
seemed that everything is in place so I then typed startx and it loaded 
gnome as root. I previously had Beryl installed and thought that might 
be to blame, but beryl is running well. After briefly searching 
ubuntuforums I found someone else fixed this issue by clearing the 
metacity sessions, so I tried that and rebooted, but same deal.

Any ideas ?

mike