Odd GNOME login behaviour

[Viktor Seifert]

Hi, all.

A few days ago I intstalled freebsd 6.1 on my laptop(Samsung X20).  I am
tracking RELENG_6.  I updated all the ports and with it GNOME to 2.16.
Now I am experiencing some odd behaviour when logging in into GNOME.
gdm starts up ok and I can type my username and password.  Than the
splask shows up but hangs after displaying "Window Manager".  But if I,
before logging in, connect to the internet by assigning an adress to
bge0 and adding a default route, the login proceeds smoothly.  I
actually have to connected it doesn't suffice to just assign an adress
and a route.
I am at loss here how to track down the problem.  It confuses me that
GNOME needs a connection anyway.  And besides: I am running freebsd on a
laptop so I won't be able to provide a connection to the internet all
the time.

Has anybody got any ideas on what is going wrong?

Regards and a happy 2007,
Viktor Seifert