I stuck my neck out and upgraded X11 to the packages in slink. Just previous to that I had upgraded wmaker to 0.19.1-1, also new on slink. At first, wmaker crashed the session. I purged wmaker.
Now, for some reason I cannot fathom, xdm starts but when a user logs in, the session crashes. Root can log in ok. Root can use startx, but a user cannot. Looks like permissions. Permissions of WHAT? I now downgraded back to the X11 packages in hamm, but the same problem persists. I still don't understand what wmaker did. I upgraded the libraries, and installed wmaker libs too. That's one of the last things I did before this happened. Thank you for any help. Alan Davis