I've been scratching my head over this one after setting up VNC on another existing server. Followed the instructions here http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/VNC-Server as usual. It worked initially. However since this server is going to be installed in a rather inconvenient place and having done pretty stupid things before, I decided for the first time to try the portion that says # Add the following line to ensure you always have an xterm available. ( while true ; do xterm ; done ) & So that I don't inevitably do something like kill kde and find myself unable to do anything. The problem now is, for some reason, I get 4 xterm window after restarting (or stop/start) vncserver. The symptoms now are 1. Consistently, of the four xterms window, #3 and #4 can be closed. #1 and #2 will resurrect themselves. *** Removing the while loop from /home/user/.vnc/xstartup does not change this. 2. if I comment out this line in /home/user/.vnc/xstartup exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc I will not get this problem. At least there will only be one xterm window in what I think is the primitive twm desktop. 3. If I then uncomment the xinitrc line, I get back 4 xterms window after restarting vncserver. It's like KDE is somehow insisting on running that while loop even after I've deleted it from the xstartup file. How do I fix this? Admittedly I could simply minimize the two xterm windows and/or switch virtual desktop and ignore them. but obviously something is wrong and it makes me uncomfortable. Everything is 5.3 standard, I've not touched the default X11 config nor xinitrc. Except I did do an yum update to current.