Need Help: session management and gnome capplets often don't work

[Paul Johnson <pauljohn ukans edu>]

Here is my puzzle. ON 2 of my computers, all the new Gnome stuff works
great.

On one, it seems to me session management and something in the panel or
CORBA are totally screwed up.  These are all RH6.0 systems, with
gtk+1.2.3, and the newest rpms for Gnome installed from Dax's contrib
site.  I've been upgrading these rpms since the RH6.0 release, and I see
problems only on one machine.

No doubt I've made some silly mistake, can you help me figure what it
is?

I start Gnome by putting "exec gnome-session" in .Xclients.

Here are examples of what is wrong.  In an xterm, I can start gnomecc. 
>From the panel, I choose settings/desktop/windowmanager, and nothing
happens.  

Sometimes when I go to the gnome panel to shutdown, nothing happens.  I
saw one other note in this list of someone saying this is a failure to
connect to the gnome-session. What to do?

When I shutdown gnome, and restart, there is sometimes no window manager
running, and I get the error messaage that the pager cant start because
it can't find a gnome compatible window manager.  This happens even if I
repeatedly try to save the session in settings.

I like the background changing app called "gchbkgrd".  I've talked to
its author about the problem I have, which is that the main panel of
gchbkgrd pops up all the time.  He said that could be a symptom of gnome
constantly trying to start new sessions or gchbkgrd repeatedly trying to
connect to a session.

I don't know how to trap the error messages that the gnome panel is
issuing when these things don't work. Can you tell me?



-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: pauljohn@ukans.edu
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700