X windows strangeness (Ubuntu)

[Paul King]

As an update, the machine is dual-boot, so booting into MS-windows did not seem 
to pose a problem. At least I can rule out the monitor or the card.

> 
> 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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