[PLUG] xdm, kdm, and Xfree 4.4

[Rob Carlson <robcarlson@comcast.net>]

I'll post here before asking on the x fora to see if anyone has any clue
about this weird behavior...

I've been running Slack-current and also made the jump to the 2.6 kernel
(2.6.5).  Doing a massive upgradepkg led me to go to KDE 3.2.1 (from 3.2)
and perhaps more significantly, I upgraded to XFree 4.4 (from 4.3).

The problem is now no Display Managers work (xdm, gdm, kdm), where as they
all functioned correctly before.  What happens is the login screen comes
up, but any user choosing a session gets thrown back to the login screen
about 5 seconds later.  The only way out is to do a console login on kdm
(on xdm, it's uglier and requires ssh).

I know from configuring my kids' Debian box-- also with KDE 3.2.1-- that
kdm no longer relies on the Xsession file with the case statements, but
rather looks for instances of <window manager>.desktop files and runs the
said window manager if there is a valid "TryExec" statement in the file.
These are all present in my /opt/kde/share/apps/kdm/sessions directory.

Some suggestions I found by googling implied that I needed IPV6
support--which sounded dubious, but i put it in the kernel to no avail.
Another suggestion (for xdm) said I needed:
DisplayManager*authName: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 in xdm-config for new security
issues, but that didn't work either.

For what it's worth I call *dm from command line if others will be using
my machine (the moral equivalent of runlevel 3, since slackware cares 
not about runlevels) otherwise I wouldn't care and would start whatever 
window manager I
feltlike using with xinitrc.

Does this sound like a problem with Xfree86 4.4?  I'm considering doing a
rollback to see if that works.  I doubt it's kernel related or kde-related
because the problem affects gdm and xdm as well.

Any insight appreciated.

Rob
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