bcooksley wrote:It appears that your computers hostname is being changed either by DHCP, or is being set after KDM is started.

It is being changed by DHCP from localhost to new-host-3. My router has a tendency to assign hostnames to my Linux machines; I have always hated that. Is there any way to stop that from happening?

bcooksley wrote:It appears that your computers hostname is being changed either by DHCP, or is being set after KDM is started.

Okay, I have confirmed that the hostname change is indeed the cause of the problem. When logging into Gentoo, I immediately open konsole and see a command prompt with richard@localhost. Then soon after opening it, I cannot open windows. Opening a new tab in the console shows richard@new-host-3. Su-ing into root and doing /bin/hostname localhost allows me to start launching programs again.

I will ask over at the Gentoo forums for help regarding this. Thankyou for all of your assistance.

I changed my system's hostname in /etc/config.d/hostname from "localhost" to something else and it resolved this issue. I am super happy as this has been annoying the heck out of me since I installed Linux on my laptop a month ago.