[vox-tech] boot failure with KDE

[Thomas Johnston]

I am running Kubuntu 10.04 and I am no longer able to boot up as
normal.  I make it to the login screen without any indication of a
problem.  After typing in my user name and password, it continues to
boot.  Normally the remaining boot sequence shows several icons
appearing in the center of the screen; however, after the first icon
appears the system now hangs.  After several minutes an error message
pops up reading:

"The following installation problem was detected while trying to start KDE:
No write access to $HOME directory (/home/thomas).
KDE is unable to start."

After clicking "OK" to close the error message, a second message
appears reading: " Could not start ksmserver.  Check your
installation."

Clicking "Okay" on this messages returns me to the login screen.


A couple of notes:
(1) I am still able to get in via the "Console login".  (I think it is
a virtual terminal)
(2) I don't know exactly what caused this sudden failure to boot
properly.  Besides email and browsing the web, the last thing I
attempted to do was install veetle (a P2P TV program).  I didn't
notice any error messages during the install.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Thomas