error starting the GNOME Settings Deamon

[Hans Nieser <h nieser xs4all nl>]

I am running Gentoo (2005.1 with testing portage tree) with Gnome 2.12.3.
Whenever I login into gnome, either as normal user or root, I am presented
with this error:

[quote]There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Deamon.

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

The Settings Deamon restarted too many times.

Last error message was:

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

GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Deamon next time you log
in.[/quote]

As the error predicts, none of my theme, background and icon settings etc.
work. I have tried rebooting, deleting ~/.config, ~/.gnome, ~/.gnome2,
~/gnome2_private, ~/.gconf and ~/.gconfd . None of them made "gnome
settings deamon" want to startup. Anyone know what else to try? Or perhaps
know of a logfile I could look at? (I checked /var/log/gdm/* but none of
them showed any errors.)

I have also tried manually running /usr/libexec/gconfd-2 which did, well,
nothing. It would do nothing for 10 seconds or so, not output, and then I
get the prompt back.