Help! Locked out of my laptop

[Anne Wilson]

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.

I can list all the files and directories in /home/anne and they are all owned 
by me.

A second user account is fine, so I know that KDE as such isn't damaged.

I'm completely out of ideas.  What have I missed?

Anne