My ubuntu 9.0.4 worked swell for a few days, then I got faield logins: a dialog saying I had installation problems or a full disk. Switching to either root-terminal or to a 'failsafe' session works fine, and my disk is not full (though for a short while last week, it was).

Looking at my .xsession-errors file:

which seems pretty whacked (no "/bin" or "/usr/bin" in the path? huh?)

Is there a single file I can whack, maybe a corrupted settings file? Or is it re-install time? :/

thanks
kb

Not a dead helpful post- can you remember more or less exactly what the error was? If not, logs are saved in /var/log - if you can remember what errored specifically, see if it is in there.

If you have to, try to reproduce the error and give as many specifics as possible.

The second issue is bizarre, I remember some years ago this was in contention- though I'd have to look into exactly what it was, or even if it is relevant; its more a memory of seeing this before

The error was simply a dialog box, which appeared after I entered my name and pw, that announced that my session had lasted less than 10 seconds and that if I hadn't explicitly logged out, then either my disk was full or there was an installation error -- and it directed me to login using the failsafe session (which does work -- I'm logged-in that way right now). The "details" part of the dialogue contained the same text I've previously posted -- that is, the contents of ~/.xsession-errors

Looking at the timestamp of that file, and checking /var/log didn't show much though this one in daemon.log might be a hint:

which is true, there's no such directory.

thx for the pointers,
kb

SO I just re-installed. It was a faster solution than trying to sort out why the Xsession was trying to aim at a non-existent directory, much less to fix it.

Robustness score so far: low :/