xfce no longer sets xauth

[depontius]

Yesterday I updated a system which had languished for a few weeks. While xfce itself wasn't updated, xorg was.

This system is normally logged on to my wife's account, and I su - to mine. Today I discovered that I could no longer run GUI programs. When I type "xauth list" as her, I get no magic cookies. Aside from making my "su - <me>" difficult it also makes remote X rather hard.

For the moment I'm presuming that something else has been done to grant my wife access to the display, perhaps ConsoleKit or the like. I also presume that there is a magic command line that will generate a cookie and add it to the server, then I could cut/paste it to my own session, or a remote session, etc. But I've never had to generate cookies, some other step like startx or gdm has always done it for me. This system is a bit memory constrained, and I'd rather not use a desktop switcher to start a second session. An xterm of my own on a second virtual desktop has been sufficient for quite a few years, now.

I also presume that this has something to do with xfce, because the system I'm running on right now runs raw icewm, and my account has the normal set of cookies.

Can anyone tell me what's up?

UPDATE - After logging my wife out and back in, xauth has cookies again. So apparently xfce does create the cookies, but something deleted them. I'll have to be on the lookout to see if this happens again. One extra little fact-oid... I'm running an nfsv4 server, and $HOME is nfs mounted, but I also have "NeverPlaceCookiesOnNFS=false" in my "/etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf"..