I was having abnormally long waiting times during which the DM was checking my (correct) login credentials. After mucking around with it a bit I decided to remove the mdm package and reinstall it. I logged out and back in again to verify and all went well. Reinstalling the package seemed to fix the slow authentication steps as well.
However, after rebooting my computer I am not unable to load the desktop environment. mdm loads as expected, but after successfully entering my login credentials the screen will turn black for a moment before reloading the initial page and asking for login credentials once more.
Any ideas on what is happening here? Must I configure mdm beyond that which dpkg does?
I also tried switching to a different tty and running startx, but the screen turns black and hangs there indefinitely.
