Comment 28 for bug 996791

@Pappy Jack, I am in the exact same situation. Removed ubuntu-desktop packages as per psychocats' purexubuntu, and suddenly poopies, whereas before there was no such problem login in to xfce.

At some point I'm going to try out installing unity-greeter to see if it helps, but there are too many gnome dependencies I don't want. For now, I'm just using the hack described by Orbital_sFear in this post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11921373&postcount=20