<html><head><meta name="qrichtext" content="1" /></head><body style="font-size:10pt;font-family:DejaVu LGC Sans"> I logged out and the same problem happened again. Lo and behold, after all of these months, this time I was able to get to another virtual console without killing X. I logged in as root and typed ps aux. The only listing with a 'Z' (zed) beside it was one that said: [sta] <defunct>. I checked and there does not appear to be a program called 'sta' on my system. I typed kill -9 pid-of-sta, but nothing changed; it was still in the ps aux listing. At this point, I might have killed virtual terminal 7, but I am not certain. Upon retyping ps aux, I saw that there was still a defunct sta, but now also a defunct X. I tried killing the defunct X, but, as before, kill -9 had no effect on the defunct programs. Then I issued gdm-restart, logged out, and gdm started up normally and logged me in, as I have it configured to do. I logged out again and the same problem recurred. I have no clue which program could be the zombie that is causing this. How do I determine this? </body></html>