Comment 15 for bug 272093

I have what may be the same problem. I do not have libvisual-0.4-plugins installed, so this is not bug 287448.

The symptoms are that, on login, the theme is wrong (an old-style default gnome look to controls and icon-set). I go to Preferences-->Appearance and get the message described in the bug title. Returning to the Appearance control panel a second time usually fixes the problem.

I can usually trigger this bug by logging out and then logging in again as quickly as possible. If I wait a while at the login screen, then the bug does not show itself. (This is not 100%, and I'm not too sure.) I have experienced this on all three of my machines, all of which run intrepid. None of the machines showed this behavior with Hardy.

Again this may be a different bug (themes versus fonts), but looks similar in some respects.