Solved: gnome-session fails: permissions

[Marcus Harnisch <marcus harnisch gmx net>]

Marcus Harnisch writes:
 > I start X and exec gnome-session from .xinitrc. First thing I noticed
 > is there's no splash-screen. Desktop background is black, and all
 > Nautilus icons are kind of generic 'dog-eared sheets of paper' (I
 > assume from stock-icons). The panel geometry is roughly 200x12. The
 > fontsize of the icon titles is about 1 (one) pixel -- antialiased,
 > though ;-)
 > 
 > pop-up windows have a completely screwed up geometry (widths are
 > sometimes in the range of 32000, as Xfree tells me in its error log).

All right. It turned out that my /etc/gconf database was completely
corrupt. I reinstalled the schemas and my problems went away. Dunno
why things worked as root, though. Does GConf ignore the system
database when running as root?

Best regards,
     Marcus