dist: CentOS 4.5

I am running Gnome in inittab and a very watered-down X out of init.d at S99. Gome shows up on F7 and the other X shows up on F5 or F6.

This works as long as I hold on to gnome during the boot process by repeatedly selecting F7 (ctrl-alt-F7) until the boot process is complete; I can switch back and forth without a problem. But if I do nothing, The plain X is what I get and the keyboard seems disabled (though the mouse still works) - at least the F* keys no longer work.

I am doing this so I can have a Gnome desktop in one F-window and be able to test X for some kiosk work I am doing in another F-window (where I don't want anything but X and a couple of X apps running).

I have played with startx and looked at all of the scripts it calls and sources w/o any success.

What am I missing? Is this really not possible form boot?

Any tips or pointers (to documentation) will be appreciated.

Brian