X (and GNOME) Lock up on start

[ace214]

I am gonna need some help diagnosing this problem because I have no idea what's going on. I have a recent install of Gentoo, with Xorg 7.4 and Gnome 2.24, with ati-drivers on a i686 system.

I can do the "X" command and X starts fine and I see the gray lines and can move my mouse, etc. I cannot however use startx. When I do as my username, GNOME starts to boot up, but I see an error message saying that the gnome-settings-daemon has been restarted too many times, X freezes, and I can only restart using the power button on my PC (can't even Ctrl-Alt-Backspace). There was a point at which I didn't get the gnome-settings-daemon message and GNOME started successfully but then still froze after a few seconds, but my mouse worked before it froze. When I run startx as root, the twm manager comes up and seems to freeze immediately. I can never move my mouse.

My Xorg logs show no errors, so I'm not sure what's going on, especially since I can do "X" and it starts fine and I can crash it with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but I can't use "startx."

I would post my logs and xorg.conf now, but they seem to be trivial since I don't see any error messages or anything. Is there some sort of gnome log somewhere? If I need to post the other stuff, I will, I'm just tired...
Thanks for any help.

[silvertoken]

You can take a look at your .xsession-errors file in your home directory to see if there is an error there. Just remember this also reports non fatal errors. It might give you a clue though as to were to begin. Also check /var/log/messages to see if any errors are reported there after you startx.

Silver~

[ace214]

I don't have the .xsession-errors file, and the /var/log/messages doesn't say anything...