X black screen when logged in as root

[Jeremy Tarling]

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help with this problem.

When I startx as my normal user login everything works fine. However, when I run startx as root, it appears to start but gets no further than a black screen with an 'x' style mouse.
The weird thing is, after I kill the X session with ctrl-alt-backspace there are no error messages on the screen. I have checked in the xfree86 messages log too and there are no reported problems there either. It's as if X thinks everything is fine!

any suggestions?

Jeremy Tarling