[plug] xserver died

[average at wantree.com.au]

I have a rh 6.0 system using kernel 2.2.12-15 and XFree86 3.3.3 as the xserver
and kde as the client.
on the weekend we lost power while the computer was on and
since then i have been unable to start the xserver when i try and run "startx"
it goes through the motions and eventually i get the following.

quote

_FontTransSocketUNIXConnetc: Can't connect: errno = 111
failed to set default font path 'unix/:-1'
Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'

X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).
endquote

in the course of trying to find out what has gone wrong i have upgraded 
XFree86 to ver 3.3.5-1.6.0. I cannot find anything obviously wrong looking. and
while looking into the man pages could not find what the error number refers to.

any help greatly appreciated
baz