styles disappear, gnome-settings-daemon hangs, must force kill and restart it

[Markus]

Binary package hint: gnome-settings-daemon

Every now and then (~75% of all logins) after I login to my ubuntu box, the styles disappear about 10-20 seconds after login. So it is first normal, then suddenly disappears. The top panel bar gets grey and the symbols in the dock are changed. My console style is also changed. See the screenshot about what I mean.

To get my styles back, I have to do the following:

killall -9 gnome-settings-daemon
gnome-settings-daemon

I have to use "-9" or else it does not get killed (hangs).

So it looks like "gnome-settings-daemon" is crashing taking the styles away and hangs there until I force it to close and restart it. I do not get any message about a crashing program or so, just the style disappears, so it doesn't ask me to send any detailed bug report (where might be more information than I can provide here).

How can I prevent this from happening or debug this further?

Here's my system:

Description: Ubuntu 11.04
Release: 11.04

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://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, could you please get a backtrace? please read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace#Already%20running%20programs ; to know how to get it, thanks in advance.

[Markus (doits)]

Here's the gdb-output. I tried to be as fast as possible after login to attach gdb.

The style vanished right after I typed "continue".

[Markus (doits)]

I just noticed something else! Here is a series of screenshot which show the problem happening:

01 - This is how it looks like right after logging in, before the styles disappear
02 - When it happened
03 - When I killed and restarted gnome-settings-manager AND nautilus

(in 01 and 02 I erased some desktop icons, so do not wonder about that)

In the last screenshot 03 I marked the symbols in the top bar - they look different than those at 01!

So when I log in an the symbols look like 01, I am sure the crash will happen. When I log in and it looks like 03, I know the crash won't happen. Maybe this helps?