[newbie] X Startup HELP!!!

[Donny]

OK heres a weird problem ive been having recently. Its resulted in me re-installing mandrake 6.1 a number of times, and the same thing happened in redhat 6.1.   On occation, ive had to restart, unproperly... without using the reboot command. Ive had to do this when it locks up or something.   When i reboot, X wont start. So i have to boot into runlevel 3 to get to the console. When i run startx from the console, it gives the error:   failed to set the default font path 'unix/:-1' could not open default font 'fixed'   HELP!