Hi Herouth and Olaf, Thanks a lot for your suggestions! Here is what I found:

Question: did you ever have KDE2, even a beta version, running? I had this same problem when I updated from an early KDE2 to a later one, as my personal preference files got somehow trashed. So, if you have a .kde directory (maybe a .kde2, I don't remember at the moment), rename it to something else, and log in again. I renamed both the .kde and the .kde2 directories and logged in again. Unfortunately, that did not improve the performance of KDE2, it still crashes as before.

Can you try to run 'startx' from runlevel 3?

As I understand it, my system is normally running in runlevel 3 which probably explains why nothing happened when I typed init 3 either as root or user.

Another thing to verify: try a fresh new user: su - useradd -m -c 'test user' fred passwd fred

then login as fred with and type startx.

Both Freddi and I get the same error message running startx: "Fatal server error: Server is already active for display 0. If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again. ..." Renaming /tmp/.X0-lock does not do anything (as far as I can see). KDE2 still crashes. If I run startx as root, then the following section is added (after the note that you should look into the log file): Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server Xlib: Invalid MIT-MAGIC-Cookie-1 key giving up xinit: unable to connect to X server xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error. Following the note I looked into the log file /var/log/XFree86.0.log from Wed Dec 5 19:59:10 2001. I am runnning XFree86 4.0.1. The following warnings (WW) and errors (EE) are shown: (WW) /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/<something or other> does not exist. Entry deleted from font path (EE) r128 (0): Cannot read V_BIOS (4) (WW) r128(0) Mode "<different resolutions>" deleted (vrefresh out of range) (WW) Cannot read colour map from VGA. Will restore with default. AUDIT: Wed Dec 5 23:04:01 2001: 497X: Client 9 rejected from local host Auth name: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 ID: -1 Honestly, this does not tell me a lot. I don't know which of these warnings & errors need to be taken seriously and fixed necessarily. If you could point me to the right/a promising direction than that would be greatly appreciated . Jutta