Unable to start the settings manager 'gnome-settings-daemon'. Without the GNOME settings manager running"

[launchpadmember]

My system:
Distribution: Ubuntu 11.04 64Bit
Codename: Natty Narwhal
Desktop: Gnome 2
CPU: Intel Quad Core 2 Extreme, X9650, 64Bit, (3GHz per core)
GPU: GeForce 8800 GT
GPU MEM: 512 MB
GPU MEM Interface: 256 MB
GPU VBIOS: 62.92.24.00.00
MoBo: Asus (Can't remember which one, too lazy to look it up, probably not important for this report)
MoBo MEM: 4GB

Description of the problem:
My themes got screwed up, possibly form the installation of one of any of the following packages.
All the Ubuntustudio packages I could find in synaptic were installed except for the Ubuntustudio desktop (I prefer Gnome 2).
"Desktop Geometry Switcher" a.k.a. grandr 0.4.1 was added to the Gnome panel by right clicking on the Gnome panel and selecting "Add to panel"
Compiz Fusion, with "Grid" enabled under Window Management Settings
Latest release of LibreOffice 3.5 (a version not found in the package manager but a *.deb downloaded and installed from the maintainers website)

Steps that first caused the problem after the above installations were completed:
Left clicked on the "Desktop Geometry Switcher" icon and selected "left".

What was expected:
That grandr would behave as it normally does and would ask me if the current display settings were correct, and that the display would be rotated 90 degrees in the counter-clockwise direction and that all would be well and fine with my currently chosen (customised) theme and icons.

What happened instead:
The display was immediately rotated 90 degrees in the counter-clockwise direction without any messages asking me if it was ok, and my chosen theme and icon set has been switched to some (painful to look at) default theme and icon set with no way to switch it back to what I had.

Attempting to do anything theme related such as right clicking on the desktop and selecting "Change Desktop Background" results in the following error message:
Unable to start the settings manager 'gnome-settings-daemon'.
Without the GNOME settings manager running, some preferences may not take effect. This could indicate a problem with DBus, or a non-GNOME (e.g. KDE) settings manager may already be active and conflicting with the GNOME settings manager.

Any attempt at starting the gnome-settings-daemon such as:
sudo gnome-settings-daemon
results in the following error messages:
** (gnome-settings-daemon:6805): WARNING **: Failed to acquire org.gnome.SettingsDaemon

** (gnome-settings-daemon:6805): WARNING **: Could not acquire name

Here is the output from "apt-cache policy gnome-settings-daemon"
gnome-settings-daemon:
  Installed: 2.32.1-0ubuntu13.1
  Candidate: 2.32.1-0ubuntu13.1
  Version table:
 *** 2.32.1-0ubuntu13.1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Questions:
1.) Is there any way to get my themes and icons working again?
2.) Is there any way to fix this problem?