locking not working even with nfs locking working

[Tupshin Harper <tupshin tupshin com>]

Sorry for the odd title, but I'm at a loss on this one. Trying to get 
gnome 2.2.2 working with an NFS home directory. Various gnome pieces 
fail due to nfs locking issues (or so they claim). Gnome-session fails 
with the following error:

Please contact your system administrator to resolve the following problem:
Could not lock the file "/home/tupshin/.gconf-test-locking-file"; this 
indicates that there may be a problem with your operating system 
configuration. If you have an NFS-mounted home directory, either the 
client or the server may be set up incorrectly. See the rpc.statd and 
rpc.lockd documentation. A common cause of this error is that the 
"nfslock" service has been disabled.The error was "No locks available" 
(errno = 37).

and gnome-help say the following:

Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that 
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS 
locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ 
for information. (Details -  1: IOR file 
'/home/tupshin/.gconfd/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd 
located: No such file or directory 2: IOR file 
'/home/tupshin/.gconfd/lock/ior' not opened successfully, no gconfd 
located: No such file or directory)

So it would certainly appear that NFS locking is not working. 
However.....both machines are running rpc.statd, and I'm using the linux 
nfs kernel server and [lockd] is present.

In addition, I have tried other methods of testing locking and they have 
succeeded. Mutt is able to read and write to an mbox on the nfs server, 
and a simple script to test locking succeeds:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Fcntl ':flock'; # import LOCK_* constants
print("Just before opening file.\n");
open(LOCKFILE,">testlockfile") or
 die "Error: Could not write to lock file: testlockfile: $!\n";
print("Just before locking file.\n");
flock(LOCKFILE,LOCK_EX);
print("Just before unlocking file.\n");
flock(LOCKFILE,LOCK_UN);
print("All done.  File locked and unlocked.\n");
unlink("testlockfile");
exit(0);

I have also deleted all gnome related dot directories and all of their 
contents, but the errors persist.

FWIW, both client and server are running debian sid

Any suggestions for further troubleshooting this problem would be 
greatly appreciated.

-Thanks
-Tupshin