Since I applied user patch 4 in OpenStep 4.2 / virtualbox, I've got a curious error: when I log in as root, the workspace crashes and forces me to logout immediately (it loads the dock but the workspace.app opening crashes). I have no problem with other accounts... I'm not sure if this has to do with my moving the root user into a /root dir with all directories (including the .dirs ) and changing the settings in NetInfo of course. Really weird... any one had this before? Be a shame to have to reinstall but it's an option.
Old topic, but ran into the same problem today.
I set up a NE3.3 virtual machine in VMWare Fusion 3 on my mac. I added two additional HD-images so I could export them via NFS to my NeXT slab. After adding the additional HD-images, I had exactly the same problem. The difference was I was logged in as root. The "me" account seemed to still work. On reboot, fsck stated one of the .nib files was corrupted in WM.app. The short version is I copied Workspace.app from the install CD into the proper directory.
Replacing Workspace.app seemed to solve the error problem, but now I can only login from the console as root. Any other account returns immediately to the login screen. I suspect there's a bad permission somewhere in the Workspace.app. Does anyone have any good idea how to fix the permissions? Normally I use the me account for maintenance, so this is kind of a bummer.