Please bear with me, as I'm not an avid user of Linux. I recently attempted to update XFree86 on a laptop running RH Enterprise 3. Xfree seemed to install ok. The grahpical Red Hat login screen appeared normally. I was relived to find that xwindows was running. Unfortunately, when I logged in I was greeted with an xterm terminal and the xsm window. I tried selecting GNOME, but same thing happened when I logged in. I'm thinking that it's simply not running a windows manager.. but I'm not sure if it's worth downloading GNOME or KDE to possibly find that it still doesn't work and still be out of an answer. Any suggestions?

No, I was originally running gnome. I had planned on downloading so I could reinstall gnome because I do not have discs for RH Enterprise 3. I attempted to update, but I don't have access information to update RH Enterprise (I'm working on it for a professor.. the CS dept. has it).. so that seemed like it was out the window.

My solution was to install Fedora (the RH was a clean install, nothing lost).. but I'm still curious as to what happened.