[Evolution] Evolution 1.0: startup problems

[Pasha Murat <murat murat01 fnal gov>]

Dear Evolution experts,

I downloaded Evolution 1.0 distribution tarfile from 

ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/unstable/sources/evolution/

and successfuly built/installed the binaries using native for RH 7.1
GCC:

/home/murat>gcc -v
Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/2.96/specs
gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-85)

(I'm running RH Linux 7.1 with some packages updated solely to build 
Evolution). When I'm starting evolution, it pops up a window saying 

"Cannot initialize Ximian Evolution shell: Configuration Database not found" 

, prints to stderr/stdout the following message:

evolution-shell-WARNING **: Cannot access Bonobo/ConfigDatabase on wombat: 
(IDL:OAF/GeneralError:1.0)

and bails out. I went through the FAQ's and recent postings to the mailing 
list and checked that:

- I have a single copy of oafd: /usr/bin/oafd
- evolution, evolution-mail, etc have been installed into /usr/local/bin
- $GNOME_PATH or $OAF_INFO_PATH are not defined, neither were they defined
  at build time
- running `oaf-slay` doesn't change anything
- I have recent [and consistent] versions of netscape/mozilla runtime libs:

    /home/murat>rpm -q libnspr4
    libnspr4-0.9.5-ximian.1
    /home/murat>rpm -q mozilla
    mozilla-0.9.5-ximian.1

- reboot doesn't help

I'd really appreciate any hints on what else can be looked at. 
Also couple of questions:

- it looks like quite a few people are reporting startup problems.
  The diagnostics printed by Evolution in this case is pretty generic 
  and (as also mentioned in FAQ) not very informative - wouldn't 
  implementing more detailed diagnostics pay off right away?
- is there a way to search the mailing list archives which wouldn't
  involve downloading all the messages to the user's machine?

                  -thanks a lot and Happy New Year, Pasha