strange gnome login problem

[Paolo Galtieri]

I went to use one of my systems running F12 this morning and I found it 
in a very strange state.  I had left it running VMware Workstation 7 
defragmenting the virtual drive associated with one of my VMs.  When I 
went back to it my monitor (24" Gateway) had popped up a notice saying 
the resolution was not set optimally.  I don't know why it did this 
since it was working fine earlier.  No matter what I did I could not 
login to the system.  The gnome-screensaver was running so I logged in 
from another system and killed the screen saver, but I still could not 
login.  So I rebooted the system.  After it came up I was able to login, 
but all that is displayed is my desktop background.  No desktop icons, 
no upper and lower gnome panels, and no terminal sessions; however, when 
I entered <ctrl-alt-f2> to get to a vertual console and entered

  ps axlw | grep 500

where 500 is my numeric user id it showed gnome-session was running, 
gnome-terminal was running, and there were 12 bash shells running.  No 
matter how many times I reboot and try to login I still get nothing 
displayed other than the desktop background.  If I right click on the 
desktop I do get the popup to create folder, launcher, etc.

Any one have any idea how to fix this?

On a separate note the gnome-screensaver and VMware Workstation do not 
work well together.  There have been many occasions where I will be 
doing stuff in one on my VMs, click on one of the other virtual desktops 
and all of a sudden gnome-screensaver kicks in and I have to login 
again.   At the time this happens the mouse is being controlled by F12 
since I was able to click on the virtual desktop applet.

Thanks,
Paolo