There is probably a simple explanation of this bizarre event.
I got a popup message in Gnome saying that /home was out of space. It is a 200G partition, and there is not a whole lot on it, so this was puzzling. I did (after a few false starts)
find . -size +10G
and was astonished to be told there was just one, xsession-errors. OK, tried it with 20G.....same. Well in the end xsession-errors turned out to be 150G.
Scratched my head for some minutes and then decided, why not, so I did rm. It went with no fuss. Then did du, and /home was now about 50G which seemed about right.
This seemed weird enough that help was needed. Now unable to start kmail. Logged off, now unable to log back in! It wasn't the WM, since it would not work with any of them. Rebooted, and now it invoked fschk on hda6, which is where /home is, and finally after about a minute or two, it fixed something that was orphaned. And now it has loaded OpenBox and kmail perfectly fine. All the files seem to be where they should be. I am just praying that it will launch Gnome, and still more, that the files will be there when it does.
What can it be? Anyone seen this before? This is Debian Lenny.
By the way, sorry to have missed the Reindeer tonight, I am still not quite well enough. Next time.
Peter