alias in .profile prevents gnome from being started

Hi everybody,

recently I got some problems updating from breezy to dapper beta, so I removed the update and re-installed it on a clean partition. After changing my home directory to a NFS mounted directory the same problems as before occured. I found out that it is about this line in my ~/.profile file:

alias ls="ls --color=always"

removing it let's gnome start without failure, inserting it prints an error message like "I could not start your session..."; the message is printed in /etc/gdm/Xsession

there are quite a lot of other alias statements in this file, but this is the only one that makes problems; perhaps it's because of the recursive definition?

my .profile is actually intended to be used as a script for the bash log-in, as described in "man bash" (I know ubuntu uses .bash_profile instead); Obviously /etc/gdm/Xsession also uses a file called ~/.profile.

Is this the same file or is this just a name clash?

However, even this does not explain why gnome fails because of such a simple command...

regards,
Joerg