I changed the permissions of my home directory so that groups could not have write access and the problem went away.
Possibly, my young kids may have clicked around and changed the permissions of folders. The error message is however cryptic and not intuitive. "User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and not writable by other users" Why? Why should that prevent my session from starting up? And if it really is neccessary, it should offer the user the ability to change the permissions then and there. -- GDM cannot write to authorisation file https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/33132 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs