Tried several things
1: Booted live disc, then administration > users, created a new user 
with password, restarted to Kubuntu login screen. New user was not 
there, shown users same as before, locked out.

2: Shawn's suggestion: First, let's make sure that the user login is 
working. At your Kubuntu login
screen, do the following:

hit CTRL-ALT-F6.
This will drop you into the console. you should the prompt "login:"

enter your username and then password.
If there are no errors, it will drop you into the shell.
username@hostname:~$

If you can get here.. it means that your user account works correctly.
Otherwise, something is wrong with the username/password.

This worked OK.

Working toward getting to the log files, have seen them while working 
under the live CD, hope to access them from the windows machine via 
ethernet and then either print or save and attach to e-mail. There were 
some questionable items, but didn't have a way to copy paste.

Herbert Graf wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 16:29 -0500, Carl Denk wrote:
>   
>> The boot is GRUB dual boot with XP, a choice there is recovery mode. 
>> That gets me to command prompt and a password which is accepted. Then 
>> the prompt looks like "root@compaq:~#" and I have been able to create a 
>> new user there with password and make an admin. Restarting and from 
>> Kubuntu log on screen, selecting that new user and password  results in 
>> a blank screen briefly and the Kubuntu logon screen again. Selecting the 
>> original user results in the red not of the password not good.
>>     
>
> That first result (blank screen) sounds like X trying to start up your
> selected window manager, erroring out and dumping back to the login
> prompt.
>
> Generally this occurs if:
> - disk is full
> - /tmp is either full or write protected for that user
> - user's home directory either doesn't exist, is full, or is write
> protected
>
> My guess if you didn't create a home directory for the user you tried to
> log in with?
>
> An essential thing to know about ANY linux distro is any time something
> goes wrong there's a very good chance a hint will be found
> in /var/log/messages. When you're at the Ubuntu log in screen, press
> CTRL-ALT F2. This will bring you to a virtual text terminal. Log in as
> root and run: 
>
> tail -f /var/log/messages
>
> Press ALT-F7 to return to the GUI and try to log in with the "blank
> screen" user. When it returns to the login prompt press CTRL-ALT F2
> again and see what messages were spit out. Chances are you'll see in
> there what's wrong.
>
> As an aside: Ubuntu is "different" in how it deals with users with
> regards to other distros I've encountered. Case in point, I changed the
> root password on my machine here using the passwd command. It changed it
> for everything but the update manager?? I then tried changing the
> password with the user account GUI, but same result. I haven't spent the
> time to figure it out, all I know is whenever I enter a root password I
> enter the changed one, except when the update manager asks for it,
> bizarre...
>
> TTYL
>   
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