Comment 2 for bug 487229

It seems this may be related to all of the prior issues I've had with the upgrade to Karmic (and the subsequent reload with re-use of my ~): it seems that there's something problematic in my .gconf, .local or .gconfd from the Jaunty days which doesn't play nice with Karmic gnome stuff:
I backed up and removed all of these three and found that this problem, amongst others, seems to be gone now. Of course, I had to set up my desktop the way I like it again, but at least things all work.

I;m quite willing to provide the before and after snapshots of these dirs in case anyone cares to track down the issue. I would imagine that the issues I've had and the resolution I've had would be not dissimilar to the issues and required resolution for so many people struggling with the Jaunty to Karmic upgrade.