Gnometastic problems

[NU-Slacker]

I have been having quite a bit of trouble with gnome lately. This is my trouble:

Whenever I try to launch a gnome-session the process appears to just hang. It sits there idle and does absolutely nothing as far as I can tell.

When I try to use GDM to enter a gnome session the X server simply quits and restarts to the GDM login (the same as if you were to logout of a gnome session). When I try to go to even a default Xterm session from GDM, the results are the same.

I have already tried unmerging everything (package by package) and remerging everything (compiling from clean sources). Any help would be greatly appreciated.