This system was shipped from Dell with OEM Red-Hat 6.0 pre-installed and has been run that way for the last 2 months. Under Gnome, applications seem to randomly 'not be presented', and there are times when I restart the system where I log in and I don't get the GNOME image unless I hit CTRL ALT DELETE. Icons dissapear, or simply don't work (ie. clicking on the gnome-terminal icon doesn't create a terminal, and when this occurs, attempting to select a terminal by right clicking on open space also doesn't work). It appears to be a race condition where things sometimes work, and other times the system just hangs. I switched to KDE and have not had these same problems. I don't have these problems on my home system (Cyrix 166+ based system with 64 Meg of ram and 8.4 Gig IDE Hard Drive). The Dell system has 512 Meg of Ram and a SCSI 18 Gig hard drive. Its a Pentium III system running at 550 mhz. The Dell Model # is 'Precision 610'. There is an NVidia Video Card in the system. We are seeing this problem on all 3 Dell systems (all identical) that we just got.
Try upgrading to a newer version of GNOME