[clickit]

I have been using the fsce window manager, which I start via a script with slackware 12.0, for several months. Tonight when I booted up I lost the icons from desktop but my window background remained. Later I booted up again and now my icons are gone, the background is black, and I cannot get my menu displayed via right-clicking the mouse.
Would someone suggest where I might start to recapture this info hopefully short of a re-install.
Yes, I am running with an ipchains firewall, which I cobbled together, so I don't think this is a hacker problem, just my fumble fingers.
Thanks

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums clickit!

Did you mean xfce??

Does the same happen when you log in as root or as another user? Try making a test user to see if the same happens there.

Also, have you been cleaning your /home directory??

Or have you been playing with unfamiliar commands?? This could be anything really... moved directories, changed permissions on files, broken links, it could even be an error in mounting. Are more things out of the ordinary?

As you, I'm not to afraid of a cracker on your system. Most intelligent crackers take pains to go unnoticed. It's not the destruction of your system they are after, but your bandwidth.

But first look at ~/.xsession-errors and see what that comes up with.

[clickit]

Yippee! I found the solution and the cause from an Umbutu user with similar experience.

Apparently, xfce (sorry for the earlier misspellling <);^) has some disconnects that can be related to Nautilus and other factors. The simple solution is to run the command "xfdesktop". This immediately returned my root window and menu to the user defined configuration. The problem came to me apparently because I had been using ctrl+alt++ to move to a better screen resolution. I used to be able to do this at will but now am limited to the one I define in xorg.conf monitor section when I go about setting the fonts so that one can read them. This seems to me to be an inexcusable failure within the system. If xorg.conf provides to me the 4 resolutions with 3 color depths, then modifying the Screen section should not forbid one from using them simply because it is necessary to divide the resolution parameters by the width height and multiply by 25.4 in order to set the monitor section to produce proper fonts. UGH!
Anyway that is the fix that worked for me.