A: Your gnome startup and configuration files are probably corrupted. This can be causes by hitting a disk quota, or cosmic rays (happens semi-often with RH 7.3 gnome). We had a spate of these in the past two weeks, no idea why.
To fix, login to your linux account through ssh (i.e. NOT running gnome). (A 'fail-safe' session will be ok).
delete the following directories...
(any and all may be there)...
.gconfd .gnome .gnome2_private .gnome_private .gqviewrc .gtkrc-1.2-gnome2 .gconf .gnome2 .gnome-desktop .nautilus
Logout and then login to a Gnome desktop, you should be back to the default settings...
linhelp@uwb.edu