The problem turned out to be a mixture of two causes: 1) A bug in my .bash_profile, and 2) a vulnerability in X (a design flaw).
In my .bash_profile, I had lines in the form of set line_oriented_history=on These lines should have been in my .inputrc, instead. When placed in .bash_profile, they changed the shell's positional parameters. Now, the X scripts like /etc/X11/Xsession and /etc/kde3/kdm/Xsession have a serious design flaw. They pass important information around in the positional parameters through the point where my .bash_profile is sourced. So, X sets $1 and runs /etc/kde3/kdm/Xsession. /etc/kde3/kdm/Xsession sources $HOME/.bash_profile (around line 10). X uses $1 (/etc/X11/Xsession sources /etc/X11/Xsession.d/20x11-common_process-args which uses $1) There is probably no legitimate reason for a .bash_profile to change $1 (though human ingenuity is always surprising), so I consider this a bug in the Xsession scripts. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]