Comment 2 for bug 380234

I got the same message after upgrading to karmic, running the sanity check from a tty when the error appeared showed that
/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.system
was missing. After creating the folder with drwxr-xr-x permissions the message disappeared.
After upgrading a different pc I got the same message but oddly enough with a different error code iirc. This time the folder existed but had wrong permissions:
drwx------