Comment 5 for bug 157622

I have almost the exact same problem with hardy fresh install
hardy daily a/o 1/1/08 also occurred in hardy 12/31/07
dont know about alpha2 did not test it

my equipment
intel 2.6
nvidia fx5200
asus p4p800
1G mem

gutsy and other [K]Ubunus OS's on same machine work fine

all console windows are accessable so
you can kill gdm and all x-session stuff

killed gdm and all X related procs
started X
executed gnome-session
things work this way but logout brings me back to identical situation

X, gdm, gnome-session all are running fine but no gnome desktop
To test further I did the following

moved /usr/bin/gnome-session to /usr/bin/orig.gnome-session
wrote a shell containing the line
strace /usr/bin/orig.gnome-session
killed all X and gdm stuff
restarted gdm
logged in again with my little one line shell in the middle of
gdm and gnome-session and things work perfectly

in my old Unix coding days we referred to this type
of behavior as a 'race condition'
maybe that is what we have here