This is where X respawns constantly, then gives up for 5 minutes. Usually this is a driver issue however I recently had this problem happen out of the blue where it previously worked. The error I was presented with was:
waiting for X server to shut down error setting MTRR
After digging around the Xorg log file everything seemed ok. Eventually after a lot of googling I was directed towards the xinitrc file and sure enough it was empty. The solution? Copy a working .xinitrc from the /root folder to the system folder (/etc/X11/xinit in this case) and you should have some sort of graphical environment to start with.