Redhat 9 crashes

["Agrawal, Manish" <MAgrawal coba usf edu>]

I am a relative newbie to Linux and Redhat 9 is my distribution of choice.
But I find that it is relatively easy to crash X.

Yesterday for example, my son accidentally pulled off the mouse chord. X
complained that the mouse was not found and when I inserted the mouse back,
it complained about Fontpath: UNIX/7100. Since X would not start, I
commented that line in XFree86.conf, X would not start. For newbies like me,
this is a killer. The only solution I have is to reinstall Redhat. I have
now done that about 4 times in the last 2 months.

I am wondering if this is common experience or am I missing something? I
hate to have to go into the .conf files to keep my system running. What can
I do to ensure that my system is immune to crashes arising from minor
accidents?

Thanks
Manish