gnome-settings-daemon timed out

[Volker]

Hi guys,

first post here (as my Gnome never did anything stupid, there's been
no need to post), but times are changing... ;)

I'm running recent Gnome (2.16) on RELENG_6 (recent).

A few days ago there has been some port updates (if I remember
right, it's been for gnome-session, hal and dbus). After
portupgrading (around 2007-01-31) gnome takes some time to startup
and while one expects to see the desktop, I'm getting a message:

There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.
...
The last error message was:
Activation of org.gnome.SettingsDaemon timed out

Later, a plain vanilla desktop comes up. When starting
/usr/local/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon in a terminal session,
everything is getting fine.

How do I find out why gnome-settings-daemon does not correctly startup?

I found the file
/usr/local/share/dbus-1/services/org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.service
containing this, which looks good to me:
[D-BUS Service]
Name=org.gnome.SettingsDaemon
Exec=/usr/local/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon

I've been unable to find a similar problem in the archives (some
Ubuntu folks had this problem half a year ago but I've unable to
find a working solution).

Greetings,

Volker