Ok .. seems that when i use kppp for a dial-up connection to my ISP that kppp seems to disable my ablitly to launch anyother software under X.
More than likely this is what is happening to you. If your machine still has the name localhost.localdomain, then I think that we have found your problem. The PPP scripts are written so that when a person dials in with a machine named lacalhost.localdomain, the machine is given a new hostname from the ISP. As soon as this happens, the machine is no longer able to perform a reverse name lookup and therefore you are not able to launch any applications under X. Try this: give your machine a real host name and add that as an entry in /etc/hosts. Then attempt dialing up to your ISP and see if you are able to launch applications. Reopen this bug if you are still not able to launch applications after giving your machine a real hostname.