Okay I have discovered that getting additional themes for kdm under mandriva makes it look like crap so I have GDM installed and use it instead.
However I have an issue, I cannot change my login photo with it.
Now I use what is needed to do this (I use the change login photo app for gnome) but it seems to do nothing, just the same boring login icon that comes by default...
this is quite odd as I have done this sort of thing before without issues.

Have you set the option in the Login Manager to allow users to change their login photos?

IIRC the profile picture that GDM uses is a hidden file called .face in your home directory, just find a picture, try copying it to the top level of the users home directory and renaming it .face

yessir, but its a no go otherwise I would not be issuing this.



I guess I can give this a try, I do know what you are talking about as like i said I have used gdm before and I do know pretty much of what does what on here

And ensure that said file is world readable (gdm is running as user gdm): file should be mode 644 (-rw-r--r--). Furthermore it should have the righ dimensions. I do not know the exact limits, but my pictures are ~45x48 PNG-files.

size should not be an issue as my icons are minuscule

Check in the Mandriva Control Center for login photo options. Mandriva may have it's own login photo setup, so you may have to change it through their tool (I do not know for sure, I don't currently have access to a Mandriva box).

Basically, in order to change the login photo in gdm, you have to adjust the user profile in Gnome. If you use KDE with gdm, then a change of the user-picture won't have any effect as gdm is the Gnome login manager. Same thing would happen if you use Gnome but use kdm for logging in. Changing the Gnome user-picture won't affect kdm. The only way to change it system-wide should be, as said already, through the MCC, system-section -> user settings.