VNC and grey screen terminal

Situation, trying to log in to gnome on remote linux box using vnc, like usual. vnc4server, Chicken client, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Gnome 2.30.2

Problem: "grey screen," vnc server isn't communicating with X, or something.

Context: Lots of people have the problem [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. I did too. The links show that it has lots of causes and lots of solutions.

Problem, more specifically: But it turns out that the cause of my problem was different from almost everything I read, which is why I'm posting. A friend had logged in as root on the physical machine using ubuntu's standard friendly login screen through to gnome. This created X servers that clogged up displays :0, :1, and :2. These servers persisted even after he logged out, and so I wasn't able to create a vncserver on display :1 like I usually do. I found them like this (though I didn't know they were unusual until after more Googling):

ps aux | grep tty

Solution: The solution to my problem was also much easier than most of those in the links above. It is embarrassing that it took me a day to think to reboot.

sudo shutdown -r NOW

Hope this helps.