Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

I log in as root today, and found the desktop is black, all menus/dialogues showing only "-" or ">". Wherever I click or right click, a dialogue pops up with a red stop sign, trying to tell me something, but I can't see any text. I can't even log out because I don't know which area of the screen to click, and besides, the red stop sign dialog always pop up. I can't reset the machine right now because it's our server,and users are accessing network shares on this machine right now. I will have a chance during the weekend or late night to reset it, but how do I recover from this error?

Red Hat EL3 with Xfree, Natillus(default options)

Does this machine boot into run level 5 (i.e. graphical mode), or does it boot into run level 3 (i.e. text mode)? If it boots into run level 3, you can just hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, and you will get dropped back to a console screen. From there, you can try "startx" to see if your GUI comes back up normally.

If you boot up into run level 5, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will kill the X-server but try to restart it again automatically. It may lock the machine up if something goes haywire. That's why I always recommend booting Linux systems in run level 3 and just typing "startx" after you log in. If you have GUI problems in this case, kill the X-server, and just start it up again.

Thanks. I was running it at level 5. I will try this ASAP.