gdm login problem and gconfd related error messages

[Hemanth Yamijala <yhemanth gmail com>]

Hi,

On SuSE 9.x systems running GConf 2.6, I randomly face a 
problem where when I try to login through the gdm login, I get one
of two problems:

1. After the username and password are accepted, the desktop does
not show up OR
2. Several GNOME applications report GConf related errors. 

In the syslog, I notice the following kinds of errors:
(pid x) : Some clown returned undeclared exception 'IDL:ConfigException:1.0' 
(pid y) : Failed to get lock for daemon, exiting: Failed to lock
'/tmp/gconfd-xyz/lock/ior': probably another process has the lock, or
your operating system has NFS file locking misconfigured (Resource
temporarily unavailable)

x & y are usually different, but come together.

The systems are configured as standalone devicea and do not 
have any NFS related configuration.

I found some queries which have mentioned the same problem and
have tried the steps to recover from such a scenario. Sometimes,
just restarting the X server seems to work fine. Sometimes the 
gconf and gnome related directories need to be cleaned up in order
to restart. 

The problem occurs infrequently, but does come nevertheless. Also,
when this comes several other processes seem to be getting
the same error because in the syslog, the above messages repeat
many times. 

Can you please point me out to any steps that I can take to debug
what is causing this problem ?

Firstly, is there a possibility that multiple processes are trying to start the 
daemon together which is causing the failure ? Is there supposed to be just 
one gconf daemon for a GDM session ? 

I looked at the gconf source (even Gconf 2.10) for where the errors are 
reported and though it looks like acquiring the write lock through fcntl on the
ior file is causing the problem, I could not figure out when this could 
occur.

Any help in this regard is much appreciated.

Thanks
hemanth