On 2/2/06, Wafa Hakim <<a href="mailto:wafa@email.arizona.edu">wafa@email.arizona.edu</a>> wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> >From this root prompt, if I type startx, KDE loads fine & with no problem -- except I am in recovery mode. Selecting recovery mode at boot time also leads to a smooth startup. I simply can't load the main user, i.e. me. (I have no other users set up on this machine). </blockquote></div> Frankly, I don't know what the problem is, but I have had somewhat similar experiences, so I have some suggestions. Remember that turning off your computer can lead to disk file corruption and other symptoms. 1. Ownership permissions. From recovery mode, check the ownership permissions of all the files in your home directory. Especially the ones that are hidden (start with a .). One approach to this is to do something like "ls -al | grep -v wafa" (if your username is wafa). You may find vital files owned by root, which will prevent you from logging on successfully. Change them back to your ownership, something like "sudo chown wafa:wafa .ICEauthority" 2. Disk issues. From recovery mode, run fsck on each Linux partition. 3. Account problems. From recovery mode, add a new user and try logging in as that user. If it works perfectly, see if you can figure out any differences by opening the two home directories side by side in Konqueror. -- John DeCarlo, My Views Are My Own