Bug#503451: gnome: Hang and 100 % CPU load after small appearance change

[Richard Scherping]

Package: gnome
Severity: important


Having upgraded my amd64 system from etch to lenny, I tried changing some
appearance options and this is the result:

- gnome-appearance-properties takes 100 % cpu load (one core fully loaded)
  and does not load theme previews (big question mark stays there)
- changing two small options ("Glanz" (german) and different foreground
color) resulted in gnome-settings-daemon to take 100 % cpu load, too. This
also occured after rebooting and logging in again (without running anything
in Gnome)
- this also resulted in a "gnome-settings-daemon could not be started"
message when trying to launch the appearance properties
- removed .gconf and .gconfd in home folder -> no longer 100 %
gnome-settings-dameon load, but of course lost all my configuration
- still having 100 % load when launching gnome-appearance-properties,
closing the window does not help, SIGTERM needed.

gnome-appearance-properties output when started from command line:

---
(gnome-appearance-properties:7061): appearance-properties-WARNING **:
Unknown Tag: comment


(gnome-appearance-properties:7061): appearance-properties-WARNING **:
Unknown Tag: comment
---

Please direct me to some usefull steps to resolve that issue. I do not have
the problem with a similar machine (that is running Lenny for one year now,
never having Etch there).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash