Comment 13 for bug 326158

Confirming the symptoms - Jaunty up to date (April 17). Root terminal command from menu fails to start terminal. Trying the command from a terminal gives the "Failed to contact the GConf daemon. exiting." message. Have confirmed that the xterminal-emulator script passes no @args to gnome-terminal if run without gksu, and opens a normal terminal correctly. If run with gksu there are also no @args, but the GConf daemon error message appears after the call to "exec gnome-terminal".

This suggests that the error is actually in gnome-terminal, rather than in x-terminal-emulator.

Checking the GConf settings for gnome-terminal doesn't immediately suggest what might be wrong, and if the error is a failure to contact GConf daemon the settings shouldn't matter.