"Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds ..."

[mnty]

Hello all,

I've been running Linux Mint 13 Xfce 64-bit for some weeks now. Not had any problem with it until this morning. On booting up I was presented with the normal splash screen. But when I logged in I got this message:

"Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds. If you have not logged out yourself, this could mean that there is some installation problem or that you may be out of diskspace. Try loggin in with one of the failsafe sessions to see if you can fix this problem."

It also showed a blank box representing the xsession errors.

I have spent most of the day searching the web for different solutions, but to no avail. It doesn't help that it is such a generic error without any error log.

I have tried creating a new user account (by logging in as root in the terminal), but this suffers the exact same problems. Therefore I assume that something has screwed with something on the system (configuration files?) for the window manager.

I don't want to reinstall the operating system unless their is a way of keeping user data from programs and automatically reinstalling all packages. If at all possible I would prefer to avoid reinstalling as the underlying operating system seems to be working fine.

Does anyone have any advice for me?

Regards,

Ed

[squeezy]

When you get to the login screen, click the Session button and specifically pick the Xfce session. The action you're seeing sounds a lot like what happens when MDM tries to log in to a session that's not defined.

[mnty]

Alas, no improvement or change. Neither is there any when I chose to run a Xclient script, whatever that means.