Help! "Id X is respawning too fast" in YDL 2.3 (?!)

[Cameron Paterson]

Hi
I recently acquired YDL 2.3 and set about installing it onto a 10 gigabyte
partition on my nearly-new 600mhz iMac (after first erasing an earlier
unsuccessful Mandrake Linux installation on the same partition).
I chose the recommended partition scheme (10MB for yaboot, 128MB for swap
and max for root). Installation of YDL (with the "Home/ Office" package
selected) went smoothly, although I did (perhaps unwisely) force the machin=
e
to quit and then restarted the installation a couple of times after I
misunderstood a few of the options (assuming previous data would be
overwritten/ erased). Once the installation had completed "successfully" I
sat back to enjoy my new OS =8B only to run straight into yet another of thos=
e
headache-inducing cryptic errors in which Linux seems to specialise! The
system starts and the boot process continues apparently smoothly until the
point (I assume) just before the graphical window manager is about to load.
I then get seemingly random flickerings on the monitor, followed by the
error message "IT: ID "X" is respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes",
which then just repeats itself, apparently endlessly, every....err...five
minutes in between weird flickering.
Searching the net, I found a few vague and contradictory references to this
apparently known Linux error =8B some vital file has apparently corrupted
(perhaps due to the forced restarts) and it may be something to do with
Gnome - or so I understand. But all the suggested solutions I found assume
in-depth knowledge of Linux which I just don't have (yet). I tried doing a
quick reinstall of YDL with the same selections and configurations, but it
didn't make any difference....:P
I would happily do a  deep level erasure and formatting of the Linux
partitions but I don=B9t know how to do this without erasing my 30 gig Mac OS
9 & X (single) partition (Apple's Disk Utility =8B X.1 version =8B does have an=
d
'erase' function but it doesn't seem to be able to see existing non-HFS(+)
partitions).
Can anyone provide me with a newbie-friendly explanation of this problem an=
d
how to solve it? Here's hoping!
Cheers!
Cameron

PS - I have just migrated to Yellow Dog after being driven to the point of
gibbering despair by the many serious problems which riddle Mandrake Linux
for PPC 8.2, so I am very keen to make YDL work!