Error Starting the Gnome Settings Daemon

[Donald D Henson <wepin wepin com>]

I started having the problem described below about two weeks ago. At
first, I tried to find the Gnome Settings Daemon but I guess I don't
know it's real name as I was unable to locate it. (My thought was that
perhaps the daemon was not being stopped properly on logout.) I did a
Google search (see below). No help. I searched the Gnome Desktop
archives. No help. I looked in the Gnome documentation (Gnome Web Site)
but the only daemon I could find referred to was the Screensaver Daemon.
I then posted a query on this list (Gnome List) but received no
response, not even an acknowledgment. About a week ago, I posted the
same query on the SuSE Linux English (SLE) list. One person responded
asking for some troubleshooting info (see below) and suggesting that I
run SuSEconfig, which I did. No help. I provided the requested
troubleshooting info but got no real response. (I got one saying that
the person was covered up with work.) I can't complain if people are too
busy or don't have the expertise to help but surely there's someone out
there who has encountered this problem before and has time to post a
short note. If you could just try to remember what you did to fix it or
even suggest a better list to post this query to, I'd be eternally
grateful. (Well, may not *eternally*.) (I would post a bug but I don't
know what the bug is.) Anyway, here's the latest post to the SLE list.
It contains pretty much everything I know about this situation.

=====

(SuSE 9.0, Gnome 2.2.2)

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 09:09, Donald D Henson wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 06:56, James Ogley wrote:
> > > Yes, I looked at SuSEconfig. I didn't see any obvious settings but
there
> > > are a lot of them so I could have missed one.
> > 
> > it's worth running it as it sets permissions on lots of files, and
of
> > course runs ldconfig (which I sometimes forget to do)
> 
> I looked at it but I didn't run it. Based on the above, however, I did
> run it. It didn't fix anything.  Just so we're clear on the symptoms,
I
> log out of my usual account, log in to another account, and when I log
> back into my usual account, I get the error message. If I reboot the
> system, when I log into my usual account, things appear to be fixed
> until I log out/log in again.
> 
> > I suppose it's possible it could be a library version mismatch, as a
> > preliminary check, can you post the output of
> > rpm -q control-center2 orbit2 bonobo-activation
> > please?
> 
> dhenson linux:~> rpm -q control-center2 orbit2 bonobo-activation
> control-center2-2.2.2-93
> orbit2-2.6.3-29
> bonobo-activation-2.2.4-38
> dhenson linux:~>
> 
> Don Henson

(Replying to my own reply)

I don't want to let this thread die without a resolution. When I
researched the archives, I found two threads with the exact same problem
statement and neither thread showed the resolution. One thread went for
a couple of replies but no resolution and the other didn't even get a
reply. I would like the next poor soul with this problem to be able to
find a thread with a resolution attached to it. So you won't have to
look up earlier parts of this thread, here's the original problem
statement:

While running Gnome with no apparent problems, I had occassion to logout
of my usual account and log on as a different account. That Gnome
session also seemed to run okay. However, after logging out and logging
back in to my usual account, I get the following error message:

=====

There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.

Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work
correctly.

The Settings Daemon restarted too many times.

The last error message was:

Child process did not give an error message, unknown failure occurred

GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log
in.

=====

Interestingly enough, the problem can be temporarily fixed by rebooting
the system. This can't be right. I was told that Linux should never have
to be rebooted. I must be missing something simple.

Hopefully without reading too much into the wording of an error message,
the line that says "The Settings Daemon restarted too many times" leads
me to ask if it's possible that the settings daemon is not being
terminated properly when I log out. This hypothesis is strengthened by
the fact that the problem is termporarily fixed by a reboot which would
terminate anything running, such as the settings daemon.

Unforunately, I have pretty much reached the limits of my
troubleshooting abilities. Surely, there's some kind soul out there who
can help me resolve this problem. Any assistance will be sincerely
appreciated.

Don Henson