[Xpert]xhost / xauth Woes

[Mike_Mallett]

Hi,
I'm a tad stumped here. I'm dealing with a RedHat 7.2 box running Xfree86 4.1.0. This is my situation: I have two users who both need to be able to use the Xserver on a machine to run builds, regardless of which one of them may actually be logged in on the box using gdm (or kdm or xdm). Opening a terminal and running `xhost +localhost` will work just fine, but this needs to be automated so it doesn't have to be run every time one of them logs in. An xhost is fine - I trust our network.
I've tried putting `xhost +localhost` in their .xinitrc files, and even in /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession and /etc/X11/Xsetup_0 (using xdm rather than gdm of course) but to no avail.
I've played around with using a shared Xauthority file (I put it in /etc/X11 and made it 0660 owned by one of the users, and a group that both users belong to), but either they couldn't log in at all at that point (an issue with a lock on the file I believe) or the other user couldn't read the file using xauth to obtain the authorization info.
I'm a little confused as to how xauth is ideally supposed to work - this was just a crappy attempt at it. Neither the man page nor any of the articles I've read seem to have a good description of how I might solve this. Most of them just describe the setup where you want to give access to one account on a different machine (for which you have the password) access to the local X server.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

        --Mike