The problem is, there are times (however few) that I’d enter my password, and it’d just sit there. Everything would be disabled and it’d act like it was simply pausing due to an incorrect password.

But it’d never unlock.

As long as you know what the application is that’s running, you can kill it. Going off of a hunch, I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to TTY1. I logged in under the same user, then typed the following command:

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  killall gnome-screensaver

This successfully gets rid of the login screen. Simply hit Ctrl+Alt+F8 (or whatever TTY your X session was running on), and tada!

Of course, you’ll have to run gnome-screen saver again or you won’t be able to lock your computer. Hit Alt+F2 and type “gnome-screensaver” to have it run in the background as it was before. It may also be a good idea to go back to TTY1 and log out, since you never want to leave a terminal wide open unprotected.

If you’re worried that someone might use this to bypass your login, don’t worry. They’d have to either log in as you in order to kill gnome-screensaver on your session, or they’d have to log in as root. And if they’re root, you have nowhere to hide anyway.

The problem was that I was using the GNOME overlay in layman in order to keep up to date with GNOME (and I believe grab 2.22 before it was unmasked or available in portage). Unfortunatly, it kept going. It upgraded to 2.23, which is an unstable development version of GNOME. It has a number of problems, not just that. For example, the splash screen would not disappear unless you threatened to blow its brains out with the kill applet or xkill. Removing the overlay and “upgrading” (downgrade to 2.22) fixed all the problems.

So, moral of the story, don’t use the GNOME overlay for a home desktop or any sort of production environment. It’s great to keep up to date…but it’s better when the stuff actually works.