Binary package hint: gnome-panel
Old (obsolete) gnome panel entries in gconf-editor never get deleted.
If a user has more than the original two panels at one time, then decides to delete a few of them (say they had 5 customized panels, and bringing it down to 1), the system warns the user that all the settings will be lost. Which is what they want.
But all the deleted panel entries are still located in /apps/panel/toplevels.
Furthermore, opening ~/.gconf/apps/panel will list all those previous entries.
They're not loaded when the user starts gnome, but they are nonetheless present in that location.
This situation can get a little overwhelming when a user is used to deleting panels and creating new ones frequently (since that's easier than to remove every single item on the panel individually).
For example, I currently have 15 different toplevels which settings I can change in gconf-editor, although i only have 2 panels total on my desktop (panels 5 and 15). All the others, 1-4 + 6 - 14 are obsolete. Every time I massively delete/add new panels, I find myself having to hunt down the toplevels listings and playing with the settings to see which panels are the ones I actually have available.
This turn, I only had to do this 15 times... What will I do when the number of entries get to 50? 100? 150?
This situation is just one major headache waiting to happen.
NOTE: Let me clarify, saying that I _never_ had 15 panels at once at any one time on my desktop. Old and obsolete panel entries are not overwritten by new ones, which would curb the growth time of the problem at the very least; they are still there, taking up space, and new ones need to be created.
I'll end this with a question: At the beginning, notice that i said that the system warns you that all your settings for whichever panel you are trying to delete will be lost/removed. That prompt makes the user falsely assume that the panel entries are indeed deleted. If so, why are they still in ~/.gconf/apps/panel ?
that's not a gconf issue