Thanks to all who replied. Flubie's solution worked for me: 1. From the KDM login screen, press CTRL+ALT+F1. 2. In the text login menu, login as your default user. 3. In your home directory, copy the following file: cp .xinitrc.template .xinitrc If the file is not available in your home directory, copy it from /etc/skel/.xinitrc.template 4. Press CTRL+ALT+F7 to return to the KDM login screen. In addition to this, I also removed references to my default user in the /tmp directory and changed the UID to 700, per Dylan's advice. Contrary to his description of this method, it was simple and elegant, and fixed my problem in a matter of seconds! :) Does anyone have an idea why KDE messed up, necessitating this fix? What's the magic behind the above solution, how did it work? I get the feeling that Jerry's method would have done the exact same thing. Also, how do I get the automatic login back? Again, thanks for all the help! Cheers, Carl