Help! Locked out of my laptop

[Rex Dieter]

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>*

-- Rex