Do other X applications work for you as non-root?
Can't remember, but my gut feeling is 'no'.
(It's probably something really simple too, I just don't have the time, energy nor do I even want to figure out how this crap works - for the time being, I'm not into X hacking, so for me it's a tool that should "just work", and if it doesn't, the worst I'm going to do about it is hate it real good.)
I think that your X server works just fine. It's probably that you don't have your default desktop environment set up properly. There should be a configuration utility to set up just that.
Cheers, Kuba