desktop manager death via livecd-creator

[Michael Wiktowy]

Hello all,

I didn't have the greatest first experience with livecd-creator.
I had 1.5 GB of diskspace available and I wrongly figured that was
enough to make a livecd. That got filled up while trying to make an
XFCE livecd using a modified (fixed repo name) ks file from
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram/XfceLive and the command:
livecd-creator --config=./ks_from_above_site
--fslabel=Fedora-livecd-xfce .

After downloading the required rpms and installing them in the
loopback image, this crashed my Gnome session that was running at the
time and hung the system so I ctrl-alt-del to reboot. My system hung
while trying to unmount all the loopback filesystems that
livecd-creator was keeping busy so I hard rebooted.

Now my system does not start the gdm. After it goes though various
attempts to start X, it gives up for 2 minutes. In poking around the
command line, I can manually startx while the root user and get a
normal desktop but not as my normal unprivilaged user. It also seems
that while I have space left on the harddrive, it is not being freed
up and that might be part of my problem. Even after deleting a few
more files, the space doesn't show up as available when I do a df.
After booting from a livecd:

[root at localhost ~]# fsck /dev/sda2
fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
e2fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
/1: clean, 291067/31129600 files, 61905503/62257899 blocks
[root at localhost ~]# df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/livecd-rw
                       4128448   2170692   1957756  53% /
tmpfs                   517476        12    517464   1% /dev/shm
/dev/sr0                712808    712808         0 100% /mnt/live
/dev/sda2            245124236 243714652         0 100% /media/_1

There should be over 1 GB free but it is not showing up.
Anyone have an idea what broke?

/Mike