Several strange problems have recently appeared when booting my SuSE 9.0 system. The first and most strange is that when typing my password the "*******" no longer appear in the password box, it just remains blank and the cursor does not move. After pulling my hair out for several hours, I realized that if I typed the password in the box anyway and clicked OK everything booted as normal. I can live with this quirk (I'm sure its some new security feature), but where did It come from and how can I change it back so my ******** appear as I type. Additionally, I can no longer shut down my system directly from a user logon session. I can only log off and must shut down from the kde boot screen. Again I would like to change things back to the way they used to be, if I can. Finally, I know this is becoming a long post, I can no longer log on to KDE as root. The screen flashes and I am dumped back to the KDE logon screen and I must logon as a normal user. I know its not advisable to do this but I noticed this after the following problem appeared. Trying "sux -" logged on as a normal user in an xterminal will not alow me to run any x related programs. I continue to get "Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server, Xlib: Protocol not supported by server, "programx": cannot connect to X server :0.0 errors. I know the xhost +local:root workaround, however I would like to get everything back the way it was before this mess started. I believe this was caused by SuSE watcher automatically updating my system with "new and improved" security fixes. I have since disabled automatic updates. Sorry for the long post I would really appreciate any help I could get. Thanks, Rodney