Comment 26 for bug 871667

I bumped into this as well, with lightdm and gdm after a release upgrade from 11.04.
The proposed solution to remove, ~/.Xauthority and ~/.ICEauthority doesn't work for me.
I still don't have the solution of what triggers this but I suggest to fiddle with .profile, excluding some lines make the issue apparently go away. (However I can't afford to comment out addsshagent or virtualenwrapper in my setup)
I notice a weird thing: even declaring a simple function in my .profile triggers the problem ie:
damn() { export foo="boo" }
damn

this cause the gdm/lightdm not to login as described here. Does this make any sense to you? Do you experience the same?

With kdm (no matters if I go to kde or gnome) my usual .profile expose no problems and I can enter but I have another possibly related issue it fails to gracefully terminate the session the screen remains still with just the background and the mouse pointer (still working) with no activity!

On three stupid login programs I can't even use one.
if you have ideas please suggest, I don't think I have a very special setup but I'll post info if required