Greetings I've just emerged from a full day of hacking. It all started when I downloaded the latest update for SuSE 9.3. Along with everything else I accepted the kernel update (2.6.11.4-21.9-default) knowing full well I would have to deal with another iteration of the nvidia graphics driver download. After all the updates were properly sucked in and disseminated, I rebooted my computer. All of the boot sequence went well. However, the machine went into an endless login loop: while (1) { show login screen for 800ms clear screen } I was able to CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to get to a non-graphics login and then tried to figure out what was happening. startx would exit saying that kdeconfigure or some other binary in /opt/kde3/bin would fail. Upon closer examination, I was able to determine that the kde applications would complain of being "unable to load shared library lxxxxx.so.xxx". I used ldd, export LD_DEBUG=all, strace -f and other utilities to determine that the binary was unable to load the libkxxxx.so.y library. However, I was able to find the library manually at exactly the same location that the binary was complaining about. For example, I would see in strace: ... open("/lib64/libkxxxx.so.4", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\360\21\0"..., 640) = 640 ... "/lib64/libkxxxx.so.4 not found!" (or something like that) ..... ls -la /lib64/libkxxxx.so.4 had not problems finding the file with wide open permissions. After trying many other fruitless paths, I was able to recover by pointing /opt/kde3 to an older partition. I assume that even though the shared object files were found, they must have lacked some signature Questions: Is there some fine-grained tool that would have told me sooner what was going on? Am I the only one that has gone through this torture? TIA& Cheers P.S. Am I blowing etiquette by posting on two groups?