[CentOS] Centos5 and X respawning problem

I just installed CentOS 5 on a Sony Vaio V505 (PCG-V505DC2P) and it worked 
perfectly.   A full yum update also worked fine.

The user made various changes to it over the weekend, and how I'm faced with 
trying to undo endless "INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 
minutes" error messages.

I've spent half the day googling various answers.   init 5 will not do 
anything.  startx and xinit do work, but don't provide the proper window 
manager nor X window sessions.

Now that I think of it, after the first yum update, the system defaulted to a 
tty, and I had to CNTL-Alt-F7 to switch to the X display.

I also tried to install the ATI video driver, but that claimed an error in the 
end.

I tried to comment out x:5:respawn... at #Run xdm in runlevel 5
at the end of /etc/inittab then initiate init 5 from a tty session, but that 
didn't do any good.

Ideas would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

Scott