Help! Locked out of my laptop

[Anne Wilson]

On Sunday 22 November 2009 13:20, Rex Dieter wrote:
> On 11/22/2009 07:03 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > I've got a really strange situation.  I've been experiencing some memory
> > leaks, and when I saw top report that I was getting dangerously low I
> > used ctrl-alt-backspace as the quickest way of killing X.  Up to now,
> > when this happened I have always rebooted, but I hoped that by killing my
> > session I might not need to reboot.
> >
> > I got to the login screen, gave my password, and it sat there at the
> > default splash screen.  I couldn't go any further.
> >
> > In a failsafe session I searched for LOCK files, but the only ones I
> > found were in /etc/selinux/targeted/modules.
> >
> > I tried renaming ~/.kde, but exactly the same thing happened, and a new
> > ~/.kde was not created.
>
> could try removing everything matching
> rm -rf /tmp/*<username>* /var/tmp/*<username>*
>
No :-(  That got me through login, as before, then a couple of seconds of 
whirring, then nothing :-(

Anne