mate-settings-daemon maxes out cpu

[bedfojo]

Every so often on boot, mate-settings-daemon maxes out the cpu. Killing it does not help as it respawns with the same problem.

.xsession-errors is full of thousands of lines stating:
mate-session[1317]: dconf-CRITICAL: unable to create file '/home/[username]/.cache/dconf/user': Permission denied. dconf will not work properly.

Somehow every so often /home/[username]/.cache/dconf/user has its permissions changed to root so is not accessible to mate-session-daemon which runs with user permissions.

[bedfojo (bedfojo)]

I see that this may be similar to some of the following:
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-settings-daemon/issues/44
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753882
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=766464

Although permissions of /run/user/1000/dconf/user look OK to me.

Well beyond my capacities to debug further.