No gnome 3.8 desktop after login

I upgraded 12.3 (64-bit) to gnome 3.8 and that went fine. However, I noticed that the nouveau driver wasn’t recovering from the laptop going to sleep so I decided to try the latest NVIDIA driver (using the one click method) which also appeared to work fine. When I rebooted and logged in however, I never reach a desktop. Instead I get an alternating white and gray screen (with an active cursor). I rebooted, logged in as root and reached the desktop fine so the issue would appear to be specific to my profile.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

You need to add your user to the “video” group to make the NVIDIA driver work correctly.
See the openSUSE 12.3 Release Notes

That did the trick, thanks so much!