Login screen pretends to be user, screwing up scripts

[DAP]

When the computer is sitting at the login screen with noone logged in, scripts that run 'w' to find out how many human users are logged in get a report of '1' instead of '0' like they should.

An example of a script that does this is the checklogi.sh script here: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Using_ACPI_%26_MythTV_to_run_other_applications

The checklogin.sh script is used to prevent MythTV from shutting down the system when it is idle if a human user is still logged into the computer.

The fact that the GDM login screen pretends to be a user prevents shutting the system down when MythTV is idle and noone is logged in.

I have hacked the script on my machine to make this work, but it is not generalized and I can think of several cases where it will fail on a different setup.

The script was working on lightdm, but I had to switch to GDM due to a bug in lightdm that sometimes breaks xwindows.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gdm 3.6.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-21.32-generic 3.5.7.1
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-21-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu9
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jan 12 09:44:28 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2011-05-22 (601 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: gdm
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-21 (82 days ago)
mtime.conffile..etc.dconf.db.gdm: 2012-10-23T18:59:34.443372