difficulties with UNIX

I was ssh'ing into a UNIX pod (at stanford university) through my lap top in X11. Everything was going great. Then I had to close my computer and reopen X11. This time, it said my memory storage quota was exceeded. So I deleted some email on my stanford account.
However, this time , I had trouble opening emacs from x11. It kept saying
"X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication." and "erorr in locking authority file....[my file name].Xauthority"

How do I fix this authority authentication error? I even went to the computer lab at my school and I couldn't log onto the machines there? it gave me this error:

"The GNOME session manager was unable to lock the file '/afs/ir/users/l/i/lizb1/.iCE authority.' please report htis as a GNOME bug. Sometimes this error may occur if the file's directory is unwritable.."

What do I do? I wanted to turn in my program by midnight ! :(

in the first place, I'd check with lsof if some process locks the file "/afs/ir/users/l/i/lizb1/.iCE authority."
the next step would be checking the permissions of the directory and the file. If the file can't be locked, it's most likely the permissions. Since that seems to be your home directory, the correct permissions should be 700, but I guess you're familiar with that