Many thanks for all your suggestions. I think I have somehow damaged the Linux installation beyond my ability to repair it and will have to reinstall it. I hate it when this happens.
I did find one other clue - I get different logout menus on this PC and my server PC. Both are Mandrake 8.1 and both were installed with only the KDE gui. On this (working) version, when I click on the logout icon, I get a popup messagebox that says "End KDE session?" with a logout/halt/reboot radio button and OK & Cancel buttons. This PC always obeys, and will shutdown from this messagebox, a telnet session, and a remote vnc session. On the server PC (with my monitor, keyboard, and mouse connected) I get a messagebox that says "End KDE session?", but it has only the OK and Cancel buttons. If I click OK, several screen flashes later I get a welcome login screen which has a shutdown... button. Clicking the shutdown... button yields another messagebox which has the reboot/halt options. Selecting halt or reboot here results in a successful halt or reboot. A vnc session to this PC never sees the second login messagebox as the screen goes black after clicking OK to logout. A telnet session shutdown command (with every combination of -h, -r, -f) issues the broadcast, but the system continues running. I'm not sure what I did to make this difference in the logout messagebox -- I was did turn off some system services I didn't think I needed, and I did shut off the automatic logon. Even worse, after one of my brutal power downs of the running server, I can no longer telnet into the server. On top of that, with the monitor, keyboard, mouse attached, my normal logon ID seems to be hosed and I can no longer view most of the disk directories. Looking at the /root view, many of the branches like /etc, /usr, /home say "Locked Directory". If I log in as root, the directory structure appears normal to me, although a suspicious number of /etc configuration files were changed at 8:54 PM last night. And telnet is no longer listed in the "system services" as it is on my non-server PC. I guess I was too fast with the chmod, chown, and user configuration tools last night. I guess I will give it one more try and create a new user. If that doesn't do the trick I will reinstall Mandrake 8.1. Thanks for all your input. Roger _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
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