gnome login failing repeatedly

[Joe Smith]

johannes bauer wrote:
> Since my FC5 installation a few weeks ago I have a curious problem. 
> The machine boots up nicely, I get the blue log-in screen, I type 
> username and password, my account comes up, but just when I should be
> ready to use it, the screen goes blank (sometimes displaying some 
> messages for 1/2 a second), and the machine jumps back to the blue 
> X-window log-in screen, asking me again to log in.  Only after the 
> second, third, fourth, of fifth log-in try it works, and I then can
> use my account normally. ...

Before you investigate the really interesting possibilities ;-) check
that you have plenty of free disk space, especially under /tmp. The vast
majority of the time I find a Linux system doing weird things, it's
simply because something's run out of space and can't create a file or a
socket and doesn't gracefully fail ("This should never happen...").

FC5 uses some obscene amounts of disk space on the root filesystem ;-\

<Joe