I am posting some better troubleshooting information that I have gathered. I ran a failsafe session and then did sh -xv /usr/bin/startkde It hangs at the following part. LD_BIND_NOW=true kdeinit +kcminit +knotify + LD_BIND_NOW=true + kdeinit +kcminit +knotify that is it.. totally hung at that point. Rick