Login -> blank desktop

[Paul Gear]

Hi folks,

I've got a strange problem with my wife's 8.04 desktop - when she logs
in she gets just a blank screen.  The problem is that gnome-panel and
nautilus are not starting normally, but these seem to be symptoms rather
than the cause.  I can start them manually and they mostly work, until
they try to access dbus and then they sometimes just exit again.  If i
try to open (for example) the "Sessions" control panel, it gives a
message on standard output: could not connect to the session manager.
Clicking on the exit button kills gnome-panel, but doesn't bring up the
logout/shutdown/etc. panel.  When i login as my user id instead of hers,
it works normally.

When i do a ps -ef|grep dbus, the system dbus shows up as user 104,
instead of messagebus, which is what is listed for that uid in
/etc/passwd.  If i change the name of the user from 'messagebus' to
'dbus', it appears normally in ps -ef listings.  It appears the system
can't take user ids longer than 8 characters...  Weird

Any thoughts?

Paul
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: paul.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 270 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-au/attachments/20081104/2a44a5e1/attachment.vcf