adding more ram would help
alot more, like double the amount you have in there now

No, I don't think that's the issue. I noticed myself that GDM is a bit
squirrelly on my installation as well and I have slightly more RAM than
he does as well as a 2gb swap partition. I'd never really worried about
it because I use XDM by default nowadays. On my system it refuses to
start up at all beyond the busy cursor on the screen. Unfortunately,
the Gnome Dev team never thought to have any sort of output appear on
the screen of the terminal that launched it (hence why I haven't
bothered to fix it yet).