Red Hat new user problems

I am working on setting up a new workstation running RHEL5 and am I having problems creating new user accounts. I have been running the system with the root user. But now I am almost done I need to create other accounts. When I open up the user management tool and add new user it takes a very long time for it to finish. I thought it might be a problem with the gui tool so I used the "adduser" command and had the same issues. I then tried to wait, it took 10 to 15 minutes after I hit the ok button for it to finnish adding the new user.

So it looked like it was working so I logged out of root and tried the new user. When I hit enter it just stayed there not doing anything. It took about 10 minutes for the user to authenticate and logon. But it would not load up all the way. Gnome would load a black screen and tell me that there was an error. Then I have to restart the computer to log back in as root.

Is there anything I can do that might help this problem?