I've been struggling with this same issue since yesterday now.  I believe I may have fond a solution (note - A solution, not THE solution, because from the varied responses I've seen so far, I don't think that the error is always caused by the same problem).

In my case, the problem was never intermittent - I literally got the error message on every boot, without fail.

The specific message that I got, was:


There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.

Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly.

The last error message was:

Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in.


I tried following all the advice in different posts (including ones about reconfiguring networking and time settings), but nothing worked.

Finally, I tried just manually executing gnome-settings-daemon, which did seem to run perfectly.  The themes appeared and everything seemed back to normal.  Upon rebooting (or restarting xserver), it was back to the same problem though.  I then decided to follow the advice about adding the g-s-d line to the startup config in Sessions, with half-successful results.  This did eventually get themes up and running upon rebooting, but the error message still showed up first every time (which annoyed me).

When I manually executed gnome-settings-daemon, I did notice something.  I got the same warning that some other users have reported:


xxxx@yyyyyy:~$ gnome-settings-daemon &
[1] 5559
xxxx@yyyyyy:~$ 
** (gnome-settings-daemon:5559): WARNING **: Unable to connect to dbus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-zlCjJ68lrb: Connection refused

(gnome-settings-daemon:5559): GnomeKbdIndicator-WARNING **: Unable to connect to dbus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-zlCjJ68lrb: Connection refused

(gnome-settings-daemon:5559): GnomeKbdIndicator-WARNING **: Not connected to dbus, will not register the object
xrdb:  "*Label.background" on line 220 overrides entry on line 150
xrdb:  "*Text.background" on line 226 overrides entry on line 191
xrdb:  "*Label.foreground" on line 232 overrides entry on line 151
xrdb:  "*Text.foreground" on line 238 overrides entry on line 192

** (gnome-screensaver:5566): WARNING **: failed to register with the message bus


So I scratched around for dbus, since this seemed to be the communication problem that the first error message was talking about.

When I searched packages with 'dbus' in their name in Synaptic, I saw that dbus itself was installed, but the dbus-X11 package was not.  The description for this particular package states that it is a "simple interprocess messaging system".  I selected it for installation, rebooted after completion and the error has not appeared again since then.

I guess looking into the networking settings couldn't hurt, but like I said, on my system, the problem was never intermittent and all that I eventually actually did, was to install dbus-X11 to fix the problem.

Hope this helps someone else - it was rather an annoyance, even though all programmes still seemed to work fine, even with this little problem.