Somehow, the permissions on my .gconfd directory got messed up. It was preventing me from logging into X using Gnome, although logging in as root still worked fine. I've solved the problem. Initially, though, I searched around on Google and found lots of reports of this problem without a single solution (other than deleting all the preference files). Here is the solution, hopefully someday somebody will read this and it will help them.
This one goes out to all those who saw: messages:Dec 7 17:31:47 mixalot gconfd (jason-4424): Bad permissions 755 on dir /home/jason/.gconfd messages:Dec 7 17:31:47 mixalot gconfd (jason-4424): Failed to get lock for daemon, exiting: Directory /home/jason/.gconfd has a problem, gconfd can't use it In the /var/log/messages or somewhere. The solution is to fix the permissions, which can be done as follows. Go to the home directory of each of the affected users accounts, and (where "theuser" is the user's username): cd ~theuser chown -R theuser:theuser .gconf .gconfd chmod 700 -R .gconf .gconfd find .gconf -type f -exec chmod 600 {} \; find .gconfd -type f -exec chmod 600 {} \; That worked for me; and I could use Gnome again. List: Please correct anything that I might have wrong here. Thanks! Jason _______________________________________________ gconf-list mailing list gconf-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gconf-list