[ale] no user/password fields on gnome logins screen

[john at johnheim.net (John Heim)]

Anybody have any idea why the gnome login screen would come up without the 
boxes to enter your  user ID and password? Obviously, that makes it kind of 
difficult to log in. I can switch to a text console and restart gdm3 and 
then I get a normal login window. But if I reboot, it goes back to not 
having places to type in your user ID and password.   Alternately, anybody 
know of how you can restart gdm3 at the login window? You used to be able to 
do that by pressing control+alt+backspace but it doesn't work anymore.

I see in the syslog error messages from gtk that say that something is 
creating widgets "not in a window".  I presume that's the problem and that 
the user ID and password widgets are being created outside a window (or 
something). But I can't figure out why it would do that or why restarting 
gdm3 would fix the problem.

PS: I'm blind but sighted people have told me that the screen resolution 
looks the same before and after restarting gdm3. Everything looks the same 
(according to them) except that after restarting gdm3, the login window 
contains places to put your ID and password.