Bug#645172: Same error there, makes many critical things unusable

[Raphael Plasson]

Hello,

I have exactly the same error there, but it has a much more drastic
effect in my environment. I am actually not using gnome, but awesome, as
WM (no desktop manager necessary).

However, lot's of gnome related applications, and even gtk applications,
do actually requires gnome-settings to be launched to be usable, so that
gnome-settings-daemon is launched by .xinitrc at startup.
Since the upgrade to version 3.0, nothing works anymore, because it is
impossible to have gnome-settings-daemon running (it spawns the
GLib-GIO-ERROR reported in this bugreport). It implies that many things
are broken, typically:
* network manager applet doesn't work, it becomes impossible to get
network access
* no theming. Besides the cosmetic implication, it means that many icons
disappeared (for example the pidgin and scim icons). .xsession-errors
logs these errors: "WARNING **: Icon nm-no-connection missing: (3)
Format d'image non reconnu" (i.e. non-recognized image format, french
locales there).
* Most (all?) gtk applications freeze for several seconds at startup
before being usable (but thay still can freeze at some moments).  I have
several other GTK, GDK and Pango warnings in .xsession-errors, but I
don't know if they are related.

I switched back to version 2.30 from testing (downgrading many other
gnome packages to testing, and removing many others), and everything is
working again. This is thus a problem coming from 3.0 versions.

The other solution would be to get rid of everything impacted by the
impossibility to run gnome-settings-daemon outside gnome, but this would
be quite difficult (i.e. it would mean to get rid of everyt gtk aps...).

Is this a bug in gnome-settings-daemon? Or is there a correct way to
have gnome-settings-daemon v3.0 running outside gnome? Or is it now
possible to run gtk/gnome apps without gnome-settings-daemon?

Thank you,
Raphaël