Comment 12 for bug 59217

I am having the same exact issue described, I did manage to see gnome-settings-daemon mess up when started by hand a few times, and each time it outputted the following message before its death:

$ gnome-settings-daemon
a3g3[1159659073,000,xklavier.c:xkl_engine_start_listen/] The backend does not require manual layout management - but it is provided by the applicationCould not initialize GStreamer: unknown error occurred

And that's the only output for me, much like the original post. It may or may not start randomly. I haven't seen it fail running under strace