hanging at splash screen

So this morning I logged onto my computer only to find that it hung at the splash screen, particularly at the world/network icon. This was a red herring though, because if you left it long enough it said:
"No write access to /home/user/.ICEauthority" and then "could not start ksmserver". After trawling the internet, I came across this solution, which worked for me:

sudo chown group:user /home/user/.ICEauthority 

- where group is your group (for me that was the same name as my user) and user is your username.
Then run

sudo /etc/init.d/kdm restart 

and you should be back in business!