Ok your right. If you can run in runlevel 3 all the time and never need the graphical environment for backup, management or configuration tools you will never have a conflict between a local gnome session and another gnome session used by vnc. Your solution works perfectly well here. However if you need to be able to provide a graphical session at the console and a graphical session through vnc, the possibility for a conflict still does exists. In this situation pauls xorg-vnc suggestion would seem to be the answer. I will test both methods this weekend and write up a howto for the wiki. If Paul and Scott have anything they want to add, please mail me off list with the details and I'll follow your instructions on a clean 4.4 box. If I get chance I'll compare xrdp too. Thanks Jason_Meers -- Have you tried FreeNX? Works really well for me on my box's that I need a GUI on