[WeakSauceIII]

I believe I have a basic user environment problem. I have been using fluxbox for some time now. I start fluxbox via console login then startx command. The next step is that my .xinitrc file is run by X. I also have an .xsession but it is just a link to .xinitrc. .xinitrc file has 1 line;

exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox

This startfluxbox script runs this file

~/.fluxbox/startup

... or a default if its not there.

~/.fluxbox/startup holds my configuration such as background setup, gkrellm and so on. this all works fine with startx. I want to use XDM now to start fluxbox. XDM gets to

exec /usr/local/bin/startfluxbox

Then it loads the default fluxbox with no background ect... The .xsession-errors file contains

/root/.fluxbox/startup[8]: fbsetbg: not found
/root/.fluxbox/startup[44]: gkrellm: not found
BScreen::BScreen: managing screen 0 using visual 0x23, depth 24
Fluxbox: There is no background option specified in this style.

these are the three things I do in my ~/.fluxbox/startup

I use root for everything. I know its bad but I'm still learning the setup. I thought it was the case that XDM was running as another user with a different home directory so ~/.fluxbox/startup couldn't be found and the default startup was used. The .xsession errors tell me different because those lines are in my ~/.fluxbox/startup file so it ran the file but couldn't find those programs. Any ideas as to why those programs could not be found in this context?