hillbilly, I had a similar problem but I run SUSE 10.1. I just had this similar problem this week happen to me. I have KDE and Gnome, but when I try to log into Gnome with my user account it kicks me back to the login prompt! However if I try to login to KDE it tells me the error message. "Write fail to /home/user/.ICEauthority" Something to that extend. So I figure out the problem, .ICEauthority belong to the user root and group root, so I just login as my root account, cd to /home/user/ and change that .ICEauthority file permission to the original owner which is suppose to be my user account and not root. All is well now.
So I suggest checking out your home directory for any file permission that might not belong to you. ls -al is the command. Login as root. Use the shell.