cp /home/loggedinusername/.Xauthority /root/ measure to stop "keyboard sniffers" and the like. Don't use xhost, use the above mentioned method with copying the .Xauthority 'mit magic cookie' instead.
while this is a good security measure, you have to realize that the authority file for root is not always .Xauthority. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's up to the environment. Without spending too much time figuring out how his system was setup, we were able to give him the ability to troubleshoot his problem.
under root, if your XAUTHORITY environment variable is set, that is the file that xauth will use.
Currently, under my gentoo systems using PAM, XAUTHORITY is set like .xauthXXXXXX for root. This is done via the pam_xauth module.
Thus to copy your .Xauthority file from another user, you should:
cp /home/username/.Xauthority $XAUTHORITY
but only if XAUTHORITY is set...
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