I have seen versions of this problem before, but no solution to my specific problem.

When I set this PI up, I installed imagemagick, weewx and a pile of other stuff. Yes it's for (yet) a(nother) weather station with webcams. All worked fine, rebooted tidily and all that. Then I installed vncserver and that worked too.

Now (post vnc install) I get a white screen with a login/password menu. I am offered <Default Xsession>, <LDXE>,<Openbox> - whatever they are. I can get past it by selecting LDXE and putting in root/<my root password> which takes me to a root desktop. This solution was arrived at by brute force testing

Removing vnc (sudo apt-get remove --purge vncserver) does not fix it.

I also tried running raspi-config to confirm my desire that the thing should boot to a default user desktop .... no joy

The machine is running and I can get into it with PuTTy, WinSCP and VNC. All the crons etc are going. I want to use this device in a headless remote situation, so this is a loose end that I need to wrap up. I would really really really like this screen to go away.