Comment 14 for bug 324115

Running it with strace will probably not provide anything useful really. What would be useful is a backtrace using GDB, and also testing if it is still an issue in Jaunty or Karmic. To get a backtrace of gnome-settings-daemon, you need to run it with the "--no-daemon" option, else the parent process just exits with success when it daemonizes. Or you would need to attach GDB to an already running gnome-settings-daemon instance. seb128 already gave instructions for that several comments up (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/324115/comments/2)