Can't get a gnome session?

[dmorin at lear.morinfamily.com (Duane Morin)]

Ok, this isn't cool.  I've been running Redhat 9 with Ximian happily for 
weeks now, periodically getting the software updates that are recommended.
Today all of a sudden java stopped working, throwing vm errors.  
I reboot...and now I can't even get a gnome session.  As in, I log in
and gnome tells me "Your session lasted less than 10 seconds.  Use a 
failsafe session and see if you can fix the problem."  So I'm in a 
failsafe session now and ssh'd into my mail machine to send a help
message :).

Here's the message I get now if I try to run red-carpet, for instance, to 
get fresh updates:

GThread-ERROR **: file gthread-posix.c: line 135 (): error 'No such 
process' during 'pthread_getschedparam (pthread_self(), &policy, &sched)'
aborting...

Help?  I don't care about red-carpet, but not being able to boot
Gnome stinks.

I am getting very bad flashbacks.  A red-carpet crash that cost me my 
home directory on a past machine is what caused me to give up on Redhat
and switch to Mandrake originally, and I've only recently come back 
to Redhat 9.

Duane