Comment 16 for bug 146946

I was having this problem consistently after rebooting. My first login attempt after a reboot would always fail with the the dreaded "There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon" message box. Logging out and logging in again always solved the problem, but it was quite annoying anyway.

The good news is, I managed to work around the problem by deleting (renaming actually) my ~/.gnome2/session file. This would point to gnome-session as the actual culprit in this case, instead of the real-time kernel. The kernel, however, may still have something to do, because this problem is most probably caused by a race condition during session startup (the fact that it is intermittent, as well as the fact that it didn't affect me on a second login with a warm cache, both suggest it.) A different scheduler will potentially affect process execution order during session startup, and may increase/decrease the chances of this race condition actually triggering.

If you are having this problem, could you please try renaming/deleting your session file and report here your results?

Some additional info about my setup: I'm running a Gutsy installation (upgraded recently from Feisty.) I use the real-time kernel from Gutsy, but this problem didn't start when I installed it. The problem was apparently caused by me fiddling with my desktop configuration: I was playing with Awn and changed my panel and theme configuration many times in a few days.