Comment 34 for bug 136529

Hello, I've had this problem too. At first I reported it as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session/+bug/179552, but found out that mine must be a duplicate of this bug. I found out that if I disable Hyperthreading in the bios, it works perfectly. The GTK setuid/setgid error messages are still there, so they are probably totally unrelated to the bug itself. As this problem seems to happen a bit unpredictably, I believe that it is some sort of race condition in some multithreaded part of gnome-session, or between different processes. Another argument for that theory is that when I strace'd gdm (like Adrian did), login worked almost all of the times (usually something was broken when I was logged in though, such as the terminal not starting).

I have no kind of authority around here, ;-)
but I would anyway suggest that everyone here tries disabling hyperthreading/smp, ie booting in uniprocessor mode.

I'd also like to repeat a finding I did and reported at that other bug, which I've not seen anyone here report:
By echo'ing messages in the startup files, I've confirmed that it runs through /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default.
Then it runs through /etc/gdm/Xsession, however, that script calls /etc/X11/Xsession.d/99x11-common-start, which calls /usr/bin/gnome-session and after that, I can see no more output from the script. This indicates the problem lies within gnome-session.

My computer is a desktop, Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz, asus P4C800 motherboard with Intel 875P chipset, 1 Gb ram, wired net connection. I'm using Hardy, installed from alpha2, with latest updates applied. It works fine under Gutsy on the same machine.