User login hangs system

[Bill Davidson]

I decided to give gentoo a try recently, and also decided to play around
with alsa. I couldn't get alsa working, but that's a problem for another
day. In trying to get the alsa modules to load, my system would hang,
taking out everything(keyboard, network), requiring a manual reset. 

Now my system appears thoroughly hosed. It hangs just like above when I
try to log in as a user other than root. I tried removing the user and
adding it again, as well as adding a new user. I have no problems with
root. When I run a command, such as less somefile, the screen fills up
with junk, I get a message telling me to hit enter(I forget the exact
message). When I hit enter, the command executes as normal.

One other thing. reiserfsck reports no filesystem corruption and nothing
shows up in my logs. Any ideas. I thought about recompiling the bases
system, but it doesn't seem to me that reinstalling everything would be
necessary.

TIA,
Bill