xdm problem: xrdb hangs, except for root

["Tony Crawford" <tc@crawfords.de>]

(Trying again with xdm in the Subject. If this doesn't attract any
ideas, I guess I'll have to trash major parts of the installation and
try again or use something else.)

Hi gang! Can anybody help me with this conundrum?

I have a hamm installation with a 2.0... kernel on a Toshiba 4080 XCDT,
and I installed XFree86 version 3.3.5 to get the vid driver for it.

Symptom is, xdm pulls up a graphcial login prompt which works fine if
I log in as root. If I log in as a normal user, I get no window
manager, no xterm, no nuthin--just a mouse pointer that moves.

(BTW the last thing I was doing before I started spending all my time
on this problem was trying to install Corel WP8, which was demanding
certain old libraries or symlinks to such. Maybe that's what caused
the trouble? Anyway:)

With some help from the nice people on the debian-user-de list, I
ran ps aux on another virtual console, and figured out this much:
xrdb, called by a 'for' loop in the global Xsession script, runs
once for each file in /etc/X11/Xresources. There are three of
those: xbase-clients, xfree86-common und xterm.

After a normal user logs in, xrdb hangs each time (pulls 99%
CPU use, says xtop--what's it doing?). When I kill it, the Xsession
script resumes control and runs xrdb again.

After the third and last xrdb call is killed, an Xsession seems to
start --I see my xterm and xclock nice root background color, same
as a root login gets--but then after ~3/4 of a second the whole X server
crashes. Whereupon xdm restarts it and the Login prompt is back.

I read 'man xrdb', but found no clues. I've checked all the
permissions I can think of, and as far as I can see the users
should be able to read and run anything root can, as far as
X11 is concerned.

Grateful for any hints,

T.

-- Tony Crawford
-- tc@crawfords.de
-- Phone: +49-3341-30 99 99
-- Fax:   +49-3341-30 99 98

"La idea de un Dios sabio, todopoderoso y que, además, nos ama, es una
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