I am having a very strange problem with Knoppix today. When I turned on my computer this morning, it failed to boot into KDE.

I installed knoppix on my HD a few days ago and have been running it since with no problems. Just today it will not boot into KDE and has strange problems. When trying to boot into KDE, the screen flickers for about 3 times as if it were trying to change the graphics mode but can't find one that the machine supports. The weird thing is that I was running KDE just fine yesterday night -- I never had any problems with the graphics mode before.

The other strange thing about the boot is that after I log in, the machine prints out a message such as "no permission for: /dev/null/" or somethign like that line after line in an endless loop -- I have to hit CTRL-C to make it stop.

Is this behavor that someone has seen before? What should I try short of reinstalling everything?