errors in gconf: could not connect to session bus

[Pedro Ribeiro <pedrib gmail com>]

Hello all,

I've been having some troubles with gconf for quite some time. The
problem is that when I su to root in a console and then open gedit
through there, I get loads of these messages in the console:

GConf Error: 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://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details —  1:
Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible
causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the
message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout
expired, or the network connection was broken.)

If I use gksu, then the errors don't appear.

I've had this bug for 1 and a half years (since maybe GNOME 2.24), and
this was manageable until I realized that on gnome-control-center, if
I apply some display settings and then let it timeout to return to the
previous configuration, I get the same error, which makes it serious
since if I choose an unsupported resolution/refresh rate, I need to
restart the X server. I was to file a bug on gnome-control-center, but
decided to contact you first, since it may be only a configuration
problem in my system.

My libgconf2-4 version is 2.28.0, I'm using Debian squeeze/testing,
kernel 2.6.31.6

output of ps jaxwww | grep gconf:
    1  1204  1197  1197 ?           -1 S        0   0:00
/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2
    1 14589   655   655 ?           -1 S     1000   0:00
/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2

gconf-sanity-check doesn't output anything.

Any idea why this happens?

Thanks in advance,
Pedro Ribeiro