Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

These drive me nuts.

Every time I start an X session, no matter what distro I seem to use, these pesky little %$@! show up in my home directory. They spawn like rabbits, and if I’m troubleshooting or can’t be bothered to delete them, they end up polluting my whole folder like Tribbles.

I found this on the tail of a howto by kerry_s intentionally aimed at an autologin option for Ubuntu. The autologin didn’t work for me, but this is a perfect solution to the serverauth issue.

Edit your /usr/bin/startx file and change line 131 to

xserverauthfile=$XAUTHORITY

Works like a champ.