A more-or-less frequent occurrence with gnome upgrades is that something changes which causes preferences to get hosed. Each time I notice such a problem, I have reported a bug report, and each time, Christian Marillat has decided to ignore the issue.
This is a very significant user issue; people who upgrade from potato to woody should not have their entire gnome preference structure randomly fail. It's a real bug. The latest issue was bug 94684; the Class for gnome-terminal windows changed: it used to be Gnome-Terminal/Gnome-Terminal; the upstream gnome developers decided to change it to Terminal/Terminal. The result is that a sawfish customization which keys on Gnome-Terminal/Gnome-Terminal fails, and has to be reset. This is a typical sort of issue; other times the names of preference options change when the preference dialog is upgraded, or other such minor nits. Each of these is a real bug and should get reported. The first time I reported one of these was right after Christian become the gnome packages maintainer, and he said to me "why do you bother me? you should report the bug upstream" and I had to point out that the basic job of the Debian developer in that regard is to act as the user's advocate and report the bug upstream. The current bug (94684) he said "I can do nothing if upstream author changes their API". Well, this has many problems: 1) Upstream author didn't change an API, they changed a direct user issue. 2) He can do something: a clean upgrade solution could be provided, either in sawfish, or in gnome-terminal. 3) He can report the problem to the gnome maintainers and mark the bug forwarded. I'm perfectly happy for him to just do (3). But what he wants to do instead is declare real bugs non-bugs, on the grounds that he "can do nothing". If he can't even forward bugs upstream, there is a serious problem. When he said "I can do nothing" he closed the bug. I replied "yes you can do something" and reopened it, and he elected to mark it wontfix. Now, wontfix is for specific reasons, and "I don't want to bother forwarding the bug upstream" is just not an adequate reason. Thomas