PATH in X?

[James Stone <stone1@btinternet.com>]

after a dist-upgrade to unstable, I seem to have lost my changes to the PATH
variable in X when running gdm and then gnome or KDE.  This is with root
and user accounts.  My preferred PATH is still in /etc/profile and works in
tty console but when I start X and reun xterm (or whatever) the PATH
variable has been reset to defaults.  I have spent about 2 hours hunting
for where the PATH variable is redefined but to no avail.. Would be
grateful for some help.   (I have tried changing the PATH in login.defs and
some other places in /etc/ also creating a .profile file in my ~/ directory
but none of these have worked).

James