Feisty in stalled, xsession keeps restarting

[Ed Smits]

Weird. I've been running Feisty for quite a while now as beta, no
significant problems. Yesterday I did a clean install of the final
release, everything looked good, VMWare worked, I was happy. Did some
other minor installs before leaving, shut down. This morning the first
thing I see after looging in to GNOME is a window telling me that my
last xsession lasted less than 10 seconds, shows me the error log, and
when I click OK it restarts X, and I go through the same thing again.
However, if I ignore the window everything seems to be working -
networking, external hard drives etc.

Did a google for this and found 1 identical hit in ubuntuforums

http://tinyurl.com/2rdz3d

the only difference being that I am running the restricted ATI
drivers, he was running nVidia ones, however I will try the video
driver route anyway. I'm not using Beryl or Compiz etc.

This is an edited output of my xsession-error log, I've taken out the
memory mapping for now as I assume it isn't relevant:

/etc/gdm/PreSession/Default: Registering your session with wtmp and utmp
/etc/gdm/PreSession/Default: running: /usr/X11R6/bin/sessreg -a -w
/var/log/wtmp -u /var/run/utmp -x "/var/lib/gdm/:0.Xservers" -h "" -l
":0" "smitse"
/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
SESSION_MANAGER=local/ca-esmits:/tmp/.ICE-unix/6417
*** glibc detected *** /usr/bin/gnome-session: malloc(): memory
corruption: 0x081e6d58 ***
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6[0xb75a8ef3]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__libc_malloc+0x7e)[0xb75aa60e]
/usr/lib/libSM.so.6(_SmsProcessMessage+0xd1c)[0xb7e3b5fc]
/usr/lib/libICE.so.6(IceProcessMessages+0x311)[0xb7e2fef1]
/usr/lib/libgnomeui-2.so.0[0xb7e82605]
/usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0[0xb76e240d]
/usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0(g_main_context_dispatch+0x182)[0xb76b8df2]
/usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0[0xb76bbdcf]
/usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0(g_main_loop_run+0x1a9)[0xb76bc179]
/usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0(gtk_main+0xb4)[0xb7bf0044]
/usr/bin/gnome-session(main+0x5de)[0x805638e]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xdc)[0xb7556ebc]
/usr/bin/gnome-session[0x8051d51]
======= Memory map: ========
<SNIP>
Initializing gnome-mount extension

(gnome-power-manager:6489): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to
session manager:
IO error occured opening connection.

(update-notifier:6490): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to session manager:
IO error occured opening connection.

(evolution-alarm-notify:6500): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to
session manager:
IO error occured opening connection.



Anyone have any ideas?

Ed