Bug#443792: Bug#444441: I've seen these issues. Looks to be gconf related.

[Ari Pollak]

Except for one problem - pidgin doesn't use gconf.

James LewisMoss wrote:
> When I've logged out of X and logged back in, but not when logging in
> right after a reboot.
>
> It looks like the gconf daemon doesn't exit properly when X exits so the
> next time you start there are two running, but the new daemon can't
> access the gconf db (probably the old one has it locked) so it gives
> back empty/invalid/missing config values.