gdmgreeter locking display

["Thomas H. George" <lists@tomgeorge.info>]

The X-Window opens but never reaches the login, just shows a small
circle with rotating dots.  As root I ran top -i and intermittently it
showed root running gdmgreeter but each time it was shown with a
different pid and I couldn't kill it.  Xorg was also running.

Background: I have been using gdm and icewm for years with no problems.
Yesterday in an attempt to get iscan installed I installed first gnome
and the Xorg as some elements of these were apparently required for
iscan.  There were no apparent problems until I shut down the system
overnight.  When I booted up this morning the X-Window was locked in a
loop as described above.

In an attempt to correct the problem I ran dpkg --purge gnome and dpkg
--purge Xorg and rebooted.  Same problem.  

How can I kill and remove this rogue program?