a final-final note (and then I'll really clam up, promise!): I just tried to connect from an nxclient running on windows (an intel mac runing windows in bootcamp), and got the same thing: the nxclient authenticates but no desktop when the nxserver is on centos 5, whereas it conects fine to centos 4.4 as the nxserver (here with x-win32 as the X11 window running on the client side). so to recap, my little issue (freenx authenticates but no desktop, on a centos 5 but not a centos 4 machine as nxserver) happens from both mac and windows nxclient. I think this narrows it down to something about my centos 5 nxserver (that machine), and something that is not: the firewall or SELinux (same thing with the firewall disabled & selinux permissive), gnome (the console and vnc give me a clean gnome session with the same user account), authentication key issues (authenticates just fine), a specific user account (same for new account), or ssl encryption (enabled), run level or ssh forwarding (these are not supposed to matter much; I'm at run level 5 with ssh forwarding enabled). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20070428/e5b4b754/attachment-0005.html>