X windows strangeness (Ubuntu)

[sciguy]

X is behaving very strangely. I am working on a PC which hasn't given X any
trouble for many months until now. This Ubuntu installation is close to 6
months old, and is updated regularly.

I currently cannot run X under any user other than root. And when I do, it
is by logging on to a console as an ordinary user and running "sudo startx"
at the prompt.  And when I do that, X is having trouble giving my windows a
title bar. It takes a long time before this happens. I also notice my
desktop switcher takes a long time to give me more than one desktop.

What I mean by "a long time", I can't be sure. But after an hour last night
I left the computer the way it was and went to bed. When I got up this
morning, I finally had much of my window decorations where they should be,
and I had my standard 4 desktops on the switcher.

X failed to start on its own, as evidenced by the fact that I received a
message that said that X failed to start for 6 times in the past 90
seconds. This is odd, because each time it tried to start on its own, I
could see and move my mouse over the black screen. It was a Gnome-style
mouse, not the default X mouse.

In my Applications menu, I noticed a long list of menu items were moved to
a submenu called "lost and found". This consisted of things that look like
they should have standard places in the menu system. Such as a session
manager, connection preferences, Add/Remove programs, Network settings, and
a long list of 50 or more other items. Clicking on these items don't seem
to bring up a window. But this is true for all other menu items. I had
Firefox in the icon bar next to the menus, and was able to log into my
email over the web and write this email. This window was placed at screen
coordinates (0, 0) (upper left) with no title bar. I had to drag the menu
bar elsewhere so I could see the menus.

I can't seem to get an xterm, kterm, or any other terminal app. Going to
the console a few minutes ago had resulted in X freezing.

/var/log/Xorg.0.log doesn't seem to have anything special, although it had
hundreds of lines which say:  SetClientVersion: 0 9

Doing a "grep SetClientVersion Xorg.0.log|wc -l" shows that this message
was repeated 798 times. Doing it again shows that this message has now been
repeated 825 times (commands issued about a minute apart).

Any help would be appreciated.

Paul King




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