It got broken about a week ago, I had not time to look into it. Running startx with explicit session name does not work. The reson is, startx calls xinit passing session name as the only argument; as a result, xinit calls default session manager that is rxvt. Like here: startx Gnome + userclientrc=/home/bor/.xinitrc + userserverrc=/home/bor/.xserverrc + sysclientrc=/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc + sysserverrc=/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc + defaultclientargs= + defaultserverargs= + clientargs= + serverargs= + '[' -f /home/bor/.xinitrc ']' + '[' -f /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ']' + defaultclientargs=/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc + '[' -f /home/bor/.xserverrc ']' + '[' -f /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc ']' + display=:0 + whoseargs=client + '[' xGnome '!=' x ']' + '[' client = client ']' + clientargs= Gnome + shift + '[' x '!=' x ']' + '[' 'x Gnome' = x ']' + '[' x = x ']' + serverargs= + '[' X = X ']' + export XAUTHORITY=/home/bor/.Xauthority + XAUTHORITY=/home/bor/.Xauthority + removelist= ++ mcookie + mcookie=6373c5900d4447f3ed3a907576f82962 ++ hostname -f + grep ':0 ' + xauth list :0 + xauth list localhost.localdomain:0 + grep 'localhost.localdomain:0 ' + xinit Gnome -- -deferglyphs 16 ... rxvt: bad option "Gnome" Rxvt v2.7.7 - released: 09 AUGUST 2001 Options: XPM,transparent,utmp,menubar,scrollbars=NeXT,XGetDefaults ... (The bug was already fixed once). Before startx prepended /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to client arguments, thus running xinitrc script. XFree8604.1.0-14mdk -andrej