Desktop fade on logout

[Michael Osborne <mozstuff yahoo com>]

We have been operating several small businesses using Gnome for several
years now. We make heavy use of X-terminals and the fadeout "feature"
has always been a problem in our environment. While it is OK if you are
running a local session, it has a definate negative and highly
noticeable impact on remote sessions. The less bandwidth, the higher the
impact.

Windows has a similar fadeout and I have experienced similar performance
issues with it when using remoting tools such as VNC. At least on
Windows, there were alternative logoff methods that avoided the fadeout.
Under Gnome, this "feature" is not optional. It is wired into the
gnome-session code. Why can this not be turned off? 

Thank God Gnome is open source!. I was able to find and remove this
feature from our system. Can a Gonf key be added to enable/disable the
fadeout? Unfortunately, my C skills are not currently good enough that I
can do this otherwise I would attach a patch. :)