Grey screen of death?

[David Christensen <dchristensen westman wave ca>]

Hi all, new to the list (and Gnome)....

I've just installed the Gnome 0.99.8 RPMs for Red Hat 5.2, following the
instructions on the Gnome site.

When I fire up X (using startx, with the line 'exec gnome-sessions' in
the .xinitrc, as per instructions), I end up staring at the X startup
screen (grey, with the X cursor).... and it never finishes loading.
Removing the line from .xinitrc, X starts up fine, into my old WM.

There is an error message when I come out (using the CTL-ALT-BKSP) about
the esound driver not being able to connect to a port.... other messages
in this group indicate that this is just a diagnostic (esp. if you don't
have a sound card, like me :-(

Any thoughts?

TIA,
David Christensen
a.k.a. Noah Vail, sigh.