Suddenly, CRASH! need help!

["Dennis J. Tuchler" <dennis tuchler earthlink net>]

I installed Gnome under SuSE 9.0, using the SuSE 9.0 CDROMs, on a
stand-alone system, and it worked quite well until today, when, after
logging in, I saw a blue screen with a notice in the upper left hand
corner:

Please contact your system administrator to resolve the following
problem:

Could not resolve the address "xml/:readonly:
/etc/opt/gnome/gconf.xml.mandatory" in the configuration file
"/etc/opt/gnome/gconf/2/path" : Failed:

Could not make directory '/etc/opt/gnome/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory:
Permission denied

What is going on?  How can I cure it?

thanks

dj tuchler