Folks, I just discovered this bug report at bugs.debian.org. Sunday night I did an apt-get upgrade; apt-get dist-upgrade on my Sid box. Gnome is now utterly and completely broken. It starts up, and the gnome-panel application begins to crash and restart repeatedly, popping up the "App has quit unexpectedly" window every time. Clicking the button to notify the developers brings up bug-buddy, which then begins crashing and restarting as well. Eventually a ctrl-alt-backspace is required to kill X and restart it. I was hoping this was a temporary problem and would be fixed right away, but it's 2 days later, I did another apt-get update, upgrade, and dist-upgrade, got a new gnome-core, and it's still broken. It is not related to the previous configuration files. I created an entirely new test user account with an empty home directory, logged in, and got the same problem with that account.
Sent from my gmail account because I can't get into Evolution now... regards, Jim Wiggs