This has been bugging me for ages, it tends to come and go. I see it most of the
time just after the system has crashed or shutdown down uncleanly.

During boot up, rhgb grinds to a halt. I have to flip to console, and hit ctrl-c
or ctrl-d (I forget which), to make things proceed. At which time some info is
spewed to the screen about .gdmfifo.   (I guess something was blocking on it).
(Investigation of the init.d/functions file shows that it pipes stuff through
here if there was any errors during boot). Only that stuff never made it to
rhgb, and it just sits there indefinitly.

why swapon is failing is beyond me, but I'll get that filed in another bug..

probably an artifact of early-login which should be completely expunged by now.

Feel free to reopen if you still see this problem.