Bug#266429: gconf2: gnome settings daemon failed to start

[Lee Revell]

Package: gconf2
Version: 2.6.3-2
Severity: important


After most recent apt-get upgrade, every time I log in I get 'The gnome
settings daemon failed to start', with something about it having
restarted too many times, and not having returned an error.  All of my 
settings of course are lost.

I tried creating a new user and logging in as this user to rule out a
problem with corrupt files in .gconf, same issue. 

This is all that appears in the logs:

Aug 17 16:44:24 krustophenia gconfd (rlrevell3-958): starting (version 2.6.3), pid 958 user 'rlrevell3'
Aug 17 16:44:24 krustophenia gconfd (rlrevell3-958): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory" to a read-only config source at position 0
Aug 17 16:44:24 krustophenia gconfd (rlrevell3-958): Resolved address "xml:readwrite:/home/rlrevell3/.gconf" to a writable config source at position 1
Aug 17 16:44:24 krustophenia gconfd (rlrevell3-958): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults" to a read-only config source at position 2

gconfd does in fact appear to be running:

root@mindpipe:/home/rlrevell# ps auxww | grep gco
rlrevell  1152  1.4  1.2  7200 5940 ?        S    16:46   0:06 /usr/lib/gconf2/gconfd-2 5

So the error is possibly not in gconfd but a bug in the way some 
other part of gnome talks to it?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8.1
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages gconf2 depends on:
ii  libatk1.0-0                 1.6.1-3      The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-16 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgconf2-4                 2.6.3-2      GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglib2.0-0                2.4.6-1      The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0                 2.4.4-2      The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  liborbit2                   1:2.10.2-1.1 libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpango1.0-0               1.4.1-1      Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpopt0                    1.7-4        lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libxml2                     2.6.11-3     GNOME XML library
ii  zlib1g                      1:1.2.1.1-5  compression library - runtime

-- no debconf information