users can't login to gnome session

[spowel4]

Fedora 4, gnome 2.10 - for some reason my wife and myself have started experiencing a problem where when we login we get a message saying we don't have the rights to login and the message references a file, which exists in each of our home directories, called .ICEauthority. When I do an ls -l on this file it shows user=root, group=root, permissions are 600. If I change ownership from root to my username I can login or if I change permissions to 666 I can login, but the changes don't seem to stick. The next time we try to login we get the same message. What gives?

[je_fro]

perhaps remove the file entirely while you're logged out?
do it from a vt (ctrl-alt-F1)