Comment 2 for bug 58382

I see problems that are very similar to what is described here on a Powerbook G3 that has been dist-upgraded from breezy to dapper. In a low, but important percentage of cases, launching applications after a wakeup from standby fails. Restarting Gnome restores a working condition. I can't confirm points 4-6, but here I see an occasional message bubble from the gnome-power icon that "standby failed" (or so).

Anticipating it to happen again, I left a terminal open and tried to trace an application from the terminal (gaim, in this case).
We see one icon file being accessed and then it tries do
do a connection to what seems to be another process - blocking forever:
munmap(0x30024000, 4096) = 0
open("/usr/share/pixmaps/gaim/icons/online.png", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 4
fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=3671, ...}) = 0
mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x30024000
read(4, "\211PNG\r\n\32\n\0\0\0\rIHDR\0\0\0000\0\0\0000\10\6\0\0"..., 4096) = 3671
_llseek(4, 0, [0], SEEK_SET) = 0
read(4, "\211PNG\r\n\32\n\0\0\0\rIHDR\0\0\0000\0\0\0000\10\6\0\0"..., 4096) = 3671
brk(0x10223000) = 0x10223000
brk(0x1021b000) = 0x1021b000
close(4) = 0
munmap(0x30024000, 4096) = 0
socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 4
uname({sys="Linux", node="pbg3", ...}) = 0
connect(4, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/tmp/.ICE-unix/4361"}, 21) = 0
fcntl64(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
write(4, "\0\1\1\0\0\0\0\0", 8) = 8
read(4,

With this read blocking, I had a look what process 4361 might be, and it was x-session-manager:
 4350 tty6 Ss+ 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty6
 4361 ? Ss 0:05 x-session-manager
 4409 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent ...

So my particular instance of this problem seems to be x-session-manager becoming unresponsive.