gnome-session and psuedorandom X crashes.

[Marshal Wong <mwong4 po-box mcgill ca>]

I know there have been a lot of repeated questions concerning
gnome-session.  And there have been some answers which have helped.  So
here are my 2 bits of a question.

I'm running RH5.2 with GNOME CVS (Feb 28 I think).  gnome-session never
worked for me.
With some helpful advice from the mailing list, I 755'd
/usr/local/share, and it started working.

However, I've noticed that if I log on to the Internet (I'm working on a
home computer) and then log off, the next program I open will send the X
server into a crash.  There is a message saying that it can't find
localhost.localdomain.  Now localhost.localdomain is definitely in my
/etc/hosts file, so I don't know what is the problem.  I know that when
I log on, my login shell scripts (ifup) changes my HOSTNAME environment
variable.  But changing it back doesn't fix the problems.  So I'm at a
loss.  If anyone knows way around this, I'd be happy.  I have similar
problems with XDM, and I never managed so solve that either.

If anyone can help, I'd appreciate it, even if this is mildly off topic.

Marshal