Gnome keyboard and panel applet problems

["David J. Bakeman" <dbakeman comcast net>]

Recently I started having keyboard problems.  I got the keyboard error 
dialog when logging in and several keys were disabled until I changed 
the keyboard preferences.  I noticed that if I logged in as a different 
user the problem did not occur.  I tried to find the offending setting 
but finally gave up (no help on the web either).  So I deleted my .gconf 
dir and logged back in.  No more keyboard problems but now the battery 
stat applet displays the colors incorrectly (when fully charged the 
green color just fills the lower end of the battery icon).  Again this 
only happens for the one user.  Anyone know how to fix this short of 
dleteing the user and starting from scratch?

Using gnome 2.12.1 from Fedora Core 4 (yea I know that's old but this is 
the choice of m,y employer)
No recent updates that I know of is there a way to see a list of updates 
and when they were done?

Thanks