Comment 4 for bug 963125

I've also experienced this issue on 1 of 2 Precise systems. I noticed that on the affected system all metacity keybindings suddenly have List type (list of strings) in the schema - you can see this with gconf-editor - all key values are surrounded with [ ]. This looks completly wrong. In particular, switch_windows key binding is [<Alt>Tab]. I compared this with the other system that doesn't have the problem, and keybindings are all strings.

I checked my local user schema:

pawel@pawel-VirtualBox:~/.gconf$ grep -R switch_windows *
apps/gconf-editor/%gconf.xml: <stringvalue>/apps/metacity/global_keybindings/switch_windows</stringvalue>
apps/metacity/global_keybindings/%gconf.xml: <entry name="switch_windows_backward" mtime="1333006464" type="list" ltype="string">
apps/metacity/global_keybindings/%gconf.xml: <entry name="switch_windows" mtime="1333040076" type="list" ltype="string">

So again, the type="list" is incorrect.

I enabled metacity debugging, and it doesn't read such keybindings:
...
KEYBINDINGS: Binding "switch_to_workspace_left" has new gconf value "none"
KEYBINDINGS: Keybinding for "switch_to_workspace_left" is unchanged
KEYBINDINGS: Binding "switch_windows" has new gconf value "none"
KEYBINDINGS: Keybinding for "switch_windows" is unchanged
...

Alex, could you please open gconf-editor and check the value of apps/metacity/global_keybindings/switch_windows?
Then, please also do the grep test like I did above. This will confirm if we're facing the same issue.