mystery: users lost permissions

[Ridley]

All of my users lost permissions to startx, firefox, etc. Plus all of thier bash_histories are cleared. They can still do things like nano, I can't figure out what kinds of permissions are lost and what arent, but I can't start any window managers from kdm, not even kde.
When I add a new user, the new user doesn;t have these permissions either. I checked the groups, everything is OK. My drives are mounted R+W. I'm really at a loss here of what to do. I suppose I could add paths again, but I think that would fix the symptom and not the problem.

Anyone else want to take a stab at what it could be, because searches like "permission loss" "users permission" etc arent turning up anything useful

[moocha]

Did you recently change kernel versions?
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[Ridley]

no, I haven't
I don't want to have to re-install, there has to be a way to figure out what the problem is and fix it.
I know I am beihg pretty vague with the behavior, but the only difference I see is the persmissions.
The only thing I think I had changed was I used the installer provided by real to get the mozilla realplayer plugin, and it said something about global links, but I doubt that is it.