[lug] serious Xauthority/gnome problem

[D. Stimits]

I was booting up, it went normally (RH 7.1), and it was sitting at the
standard login prompt for runlevel 5 default, gnome. When I logged in
with regular user, it crashed (hard lockup, no ping, magic sysrq dead).
When it came back up, my regular user was rejected from login due to
.Xauthority it looks like. root could still login normally. And if I
used KDE instead of gnome, my regular user could still login (and in
fact, that is how I am managing to get to my email program Netscape). I
went through and tried to regenerate my .Xauthority, but I am doing
something seriously wrong, and I'm getting tired of KDE (my OpenGL
programs crash and die there, probably due to sound daemon interaction
rather than OpenGL itself). Here is a sample of some log messages after
I tried to regenerate .Xauthority (and this was after an older backup
version of .Xauthority failed):

gdm[5237]: gdm_auth_secure_display: Setting up access for :0
gdm[5237]: gdm_auth_secure_display: Setting up socket access
gdm[5237]: gdm_auth_secure_display: Setting up network access
gdm[5237]: gdm_auth_secure_display: Setting up access for :0 - 2 entries
gdm[5645]: gdm_server_start: '/usr/bin/X11/X -auth /var/gdm/:0.Xauth :0'
gdm[5237]: gdm_server_usr1_handler: Starting display :0!
gdm[5237]: gdm_display_manage: Managing :0
gdm[5237]: gdm_display_manage: Forked slave: 5646
gdm[5646]: gdm_slave_start: Starting slave process for :0
gdm[5646]: gdm_slave_start: Opening display :0
kernel: NVRM: AGPGART: Intel i840 chipset
kernel: NVRM: AGPGART: aperture: 128M @ 0xf0000000
kernel: NVRM: AGPGART: aperture mapped from 0xf0000000 to 0xd5b1c000
kernel: NVRM: AGPGART: mode 4x
kernel: NVRM: AGPGART: allocated 16 pages
gdm[5646]: gdm_slave_greeter: Running greeter on :0
gdm[5646]: gdm_slave_greeter: Greeter on pid 5654
gdm(pam_unix)[5646]: session opened for user stimits by (uid=0)
gdm[5646]: gdm_slave_greeter: Authentication completed. Whacking greeter
gdm[5646]: gdm_slave_windows_kill: Killing windows on :0
gdm[5646]: gdm_slave_session_start: stimits on :0
gdm[5646]: gdm_auth_user_add: Adding cookie for 500
gdm[5646]: gdm_auth_user_add: Using /home/home1/stimits/.Xauthority for
cookies
gdm[5646]: gdm_auth_purge: :0
gdm[5646]: gdm_auth_user_add: Done

It appears that since it died right in the middle of the login process
originally, something it writes during the process has been corrupted.
Can anyone give me an idea of how to regenerate the .Xauthority for a
regular user? Prior to this I had been getting this all the time, but it
had no effect:
gdm[3267]: gdm_auth_user_remove: /home/home1/stimits is not owned by uid
0.
gdm[3267]: gdm_auth_user_remove: Ignoring suspiciously looking cookie
file /home/home1/stimits/.Xauthority

Now the odd thing on that is that when I did experiment with the home
directory .Xauthority permissions, when I set things as owned by root
(uid 0), it then complained that it was not owned by my regular user
instead...it couldn't make up its mind.

Right now I don't know what is wrong, but I suspect that whatever it is
will be on top of a bad .Xauthority. Is this file regenerated each
login? Or is it a static file? Since the man page only led me to
generate .Xauthority files that gave even more errors with weird
statements like "whacking greeter", I need to verify that I am doing it
correctly. Can someone tell me a means of correct generation (and file
perms) for an individual user's .Xauthority file for gnome sessions?
Then I can decide whether some other part of the whole process is dead.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com