I can reproduce this, but ONLY during installation from the LiveCD. Also, my testing was with Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS ISO image.
What happened: I write the above ISO to CD and tried to boot with it. The detected video driver ("ati") does not work on my system for whatever reason, so X failed to start and I eventually got a console prompt. I used "ps" and determined that GDM was still running. I ran sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop, then used ps again and determined GDM was STILL running. No matter how many times I ran it, GDM was never stopped. If I used kill on it, it stopped immediately. I ran sudo /bin/sh -x /etc/init.d/gdm stop and discovered that start- stop-daemon was being invoked with the --exec flag (that is, SSD_ARG was set to "--exec /usr/sbin/gdm"). This did not seem to work. If I ran start-stop-daemon by hand, using the same command line but leaving out the --exec, it worked fine and GDM was stopped. -- GDM init script has weird line (breaks it for me) https://launchpad.net/bugs/23828 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs