Login screen bounces back to login screen post-crash

[TimSaturday]

Hello, firstly I will have to apologize for any blatant lack of knowledge I may have, I'm just starting to use OpenSuse to learn a few things; so I'm probably well behind a lot of people here in know-how.

Here's what lead up to the problem, PC Gamer gave away a million free Steam Keys for SpaceChem so I figured; what the hell, who can say no to a free game? I installed, and one thing I noticed was it had issue going to fullscreen so I had to force close SpaceChem & Steam. After starting Steam back up and attempting to start the game, it started in fullscreen no problem.

After a bit of dicking around, I decided it was time to quit; when I went to exit game, and pressed the button; the entire system froze.

Upon reboot, my auto-login failed, the 'progress' bar would get up to the globe before the entire screen would flicker, the resolution would be off, and the entire image would be off the center of the screen, it would then flicker black and return me to the login screen.
Any attempt to log in under normal circumstances results in this behavior.

Although I CAN login to root, and I CAN login to my account in recovery mode.

Can someone assist me in diagnosing this issue?
I am running 13.1 on a hp pavilion dv6433cl which would have an integrated graphics card on the mobo instead of it's own.

[gogalthorp]

Just a guess, for some reason you are stuck in full screen and it is unstable. So what Video card and driver?

There may be a file in your home that is setting a bad condition since recovery mode works it point to a problem with the normal video driver

[TimSaturday]

That's what I was suspecting after doing a bit of research, but as I'm new to linux I'm not sure on how to diagnose and correct this problem.

Here is the output for

/sbin/lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A2

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27a2] (rev 03)        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:30bb]
        Kernel modules: i915

[gogalthorp]

So it is an Intel. I don't use Intel thus and not familiar with the fine points. Did you try a full power off restart? maybe the hardware is stuck in a bad state, though it seems more like a driver problem but Intel's driver is part of the kernel these days so some settings file miss set???

Is this a notebook and maybe also have a NVIDIA chip??

[TimSaturday]

Yeah, I've fully shut it down instead of simply restarting multiple times without any changes in behavior.

It is a notebook, and unfortunately it is a few years old and a hand-me-down so the only graphics hardware it has is the integrated chip.

[gogalthorp]

Might be a steam problem. Steam stuff is sort of at a beta level.

I've been using the new driver for a whiles and see no problems but I don't run Steam

[TimSaturday]

Well I don't have steam running on startup, could it still be affecting the graphics even when the process is not being run?

[gogalthorp]

Something got stuck I admit not to know what it could be it is half way in full screen so it crashes. Just as a test can you create a new user in Yast and log into the machine as that user and see if it ts a problem with a file in your home. If it works then we need to figure which file is actually causing the problem

[TimSaturday]

I have created a dummy user account which I aptly named dummy, and was able to log into it regularly.
I am no longer in recovery mode and everything seems to be working, which means the issue is specifically with my normal account.

[gogalthorp]

Yep the question is where LOL

Ok which desktop??

If KDE try as root from the new dummy account rename in you r home .kde4 folder

become root in a konsole

type
su
then root password
then
mv /home/yourusername here/.kde4 /home/youusername here/.kde4.back

note the period in front of kde4

Once done try loging on as normal it will have the default desktop not any you set up