Gconf errors in most gnome apps after upgrade to 8.10

[zorblek]

After upgrading from Hardy to Intrepid, rebooting, and logging in, I see a black screen with numerous error windows, displaying the following messages for nearly every gnome app that runs on startup:

"An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for [gnome app]. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly."

and

"GConf error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Could not send message to gconf daemon: Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))"

These errors appear whenever I attempt to run any app that relies on gnome (for example, I can run xterm but not gnome-terminal), and make Ubuntu nearly unusable for most tasks.

I am kind of a Linux newbie, but if you can tell me how to find whatever log files would be relevant here from the terminal I'll post them if I can. I can't get online from Ubuntu right now, and this is my only machine, which complicates the process a bit.

To reproduce: Upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 (I am using Wubi; I don't know if that is relevant), reboot, log in.

There are other users reporting the same bug at http://ge.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?p=6197006 .
Also, there is a bug affecting only gnome-terminal that may be related at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/298426 .

[zorblek (zorblek)]

I should note that the threads I listed above had a couple of workarounds (including just rebooting); I haven't had any success with these.

[zeddock (zeddock)]

Same here on regular boot. Decided to post comment here since seems others are hitting error while doing other things, whereas error hits here with just regular boot.

zeddock

PS. Any simple work-arowund? This is affecting a newb user who is far from me. Trying to support him remotely over phone and his system is now unusable.

[zorblek (zorblek)]

On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 8:59 AM, zeddock <email address hidden> wrote:

> PS. Any simple work-arowund? This is affecting a newb user who is far
> from me. Trying to support him remotely over phone and his system is now
> unusable.

None that I know of, unfortunately. I eventually just backed up my files
from the command line (using xterm, since gnome's terminal was broken along
with everything else) and did a complete re-install of 8.10 from scratch. I
haven't had any problems so far, but it's only been a couple of days...

[Lupine (thelupine)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Andres Mujica (andres.mujica)]

I'm marking this bug as invalid, as is probably a config problem and it wasn't clearly identified the origin of it.

[Riccardo Pelizzi (r-pelizzi)]

i'm experiencing this problem right now, though less severe: gnome runs fine on the main display, but i'm trying to run gnome apps on a vnc display from the same user and i have this problem. i just upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 and everything worked fine before. I guess i have to reinstall everything :-/

[Chuck (michael-walker014)]

i have been experiencing this program as well, gnome starts but the windows all appear in the top left corner and are not movable. each one piles on top of the other and the task bar does not register them. the two work round's i have found are opening terminal and starting gnome-terminal, the other is able since i have the netbook version install, i switch the desktop manager, twice, if i do it once it doesn't work, hope this helps all, still looking for a more permanent solution