Startup problem

[Asheville Joe]

Yesterday, I was trying print a couple of M$ Word files I got as email
attachments  (in OOo Write) and my system locked up.  Got out with a few
three finger salutes and was able to relogin as my user.  Duplicated it
again, but this time had to reset to get out of it.

When I rebooted it gave me one of those options that are gone before you
can read them, so I hit reset and did it again.  It offered to let me
force a file system check.  I said yes.  It went through the whole thing
for hda7 (boot), claimed it didn't do it and asked me if I wanted to do
it again and allow repairs.  Trusting soul that I am, I said yes and it
went through several more steps, but didn't actually say anything about
what it may have fixed.

When it (Mandrake 9.1) finished booting I got the normal blue screen of
hope, the wavy pattern screen of almost there, and then up poped "X
Window System Login".  My normal Mandrake login panel was gone.

When I login, everything works as expected - kde comes up, etc., but
when I logout, all I get is the same Xwindows Login panel.  I no longer
have any option to shutdown or reboot at all.  The only way I figured
out to do that was to open an Xterm and issue the shutdown command as root.

I just read through dmesg, and don't see any new complaints.

I'm looking for any ideas as to what happened and how to get the
Mandrake login screen back.

Thanks.

Joe


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"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not 
depend on us. We are not the only experiment." --R. Buckminster Fuller 
(1895 - 1983)