How do I fix broken NM gconf entries?

[Unit3 <unit3 demoni ca>]

Hi,

Somehow, my networkmanager setup has gotten seriously thrashed. The
system/networking folder is entirely missing from ~/.gconf, and now
network manager gets stuck. From syslog, it gets to this point, and step
5 never completes:

Jul 15 13:42:06 RoH NetworkManager: <info>  Activation (eth1) Stage 4 of
5 (IP Configure Get) complete.
Jul 15 13:42:06 RoH NetworkManager: <info>  Activation (eth1) Stage 5 of
5 (IP Configure Commit) started...

I assume this is because it has no writeable gconf area to save the
network configuration into. Because of this, nm-applet just sits in the
notification area spinning forever. It incorrectly reports that the
network isn't quite setup to any app that requests network status via
dbus. Worse, once I've selected an AP, I can't select any other one,
because NM is waiting for step 5 to complete before doing anything else.

I'm not sure what I did to get it to this state, but does anyone have
any ideas how to fix it? I can't seem to find any NM schema or gconf
tree to import on my system, so I'm not sure where to get the missing
gconf info to make NM happy.

Thanks!
Graeme