Comment 15 for bug 827414

This is because in Unity's environment, DBUS_STARTER_ADDRESS is set. And in gedit (gedit-dbus.c:767), that will trigger gedit to start as a service instead of a standalone window. So it won't show anything, but it will be around to grab and proxy future gedit opens (as you see when you try to launch it the second time).

Not sure of the proper fix for this yet.