Comment 22 for bug 321041

Could somebody experiencing this bug and can recreate it easily please run the following in a terminal to try and get a more useful backtrace, as the one here does not have any useful information in it:

killall gnome-settings-daemon
gdb gnome-settings-daemon 2>&1 | tee gsd.log
break gdk_x_error
run --sync --no-daemon

When it breaks, please run "bt full" to obtain a backtrace. This will also break on normally handled exceptions, which are perfectly ok. To make sure that the error you just caught wasn't a harmless handled exception, please run "cont" and see if it breaks again, or just aborts. If it aborts, then the trace you got is useful. If it breaks again, then please go through this cycle until it eventually aborts. The last trace is the useful one.

Please attach gsd.log to this report.

Karmic users will also need to do the following before trying to obtain a backtrace, because the media-keys plugin sets xlib to run asynchronously again when it loads, regardless if whether you specified the "--sync" option or not:

gconftool-2 -s --type bool /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/media-keys/active 0

Please also make sure you have the following packages installed before getting the backtrace: gnome-settings-daemon-dbgsym, libglib2.0-0-dbg, libgtk2.0-0-dbg, libc6-dbg, libxklavier12-dbgsym (jaunty), libxklavier15-dbgsym (karmic), libx11-6-dbgsym and libxi6-dbg

If you can only recreate the crash on login, then you will need to take a different approach. Edit /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.desktop and add "--sync" to the end of the "Exec" line. Log out and back in again. If it crashes, Apport will catch the crash and generate a crash report. Don't submit this one though- I would rather you attached the stacktrace to this report for now. The stacktrace should be complete without any processing from the retracer, seeing as you already installed the dbgsym packages I mentioned earlier. (If you do submit the crash report as a separate bug, please tell me the bug number).

To extract the stacktrace from your apport crash report, do the following:

mkdir gsd-crash
apport-unpack /var/crash/_usr_lib_gnome-settings-daemon.<uid>.crash ~/gsd-crash

(Obviously replacing "<uid>" with your user ID).

Once you have done this, there will be a file named "Stacktrace" in ~/gsd-crash. Please attach this. Then make sure you remove the "--sync" option from /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.desktop again.

Thanks