Clay Thanks for the reply. At least I found the log files! In the gdm logfile was a complaint from glib, and in the regular logfile there was an entry about pwent (part of PAM) returning NULL so :0 was aborted. So, I replaced gdm, pam, and glib with no results (It still dies on login). The gdm and pam packages also verified, but I replaced them anyway. I noticed that it complains the gdm logfile about there not being a user 42. This shouldn't be a big problem as I have another machine without it and it still succeeds. I created the user from the password file of a machine that works (I don't know enough about Linux to do any fancy modifications, so the installations should be the same) and also created the home dir. Didn't help. There's a difference between the logfiles of machines that work and those that dont: the successful one says that it's doing SetKeyboard and then claims it succeeds. Any ideas? Thanks Ed Hoeffner