GNOME crashing just before it finishes starting a session

[William Denton]

I recently upgraded X to 7.2 on one of my boxes and now GNOME and Metacity 
crash just in the final stages of starting a session.

I'm running 6.2-STABLE, x.org-7.2, and gnome2-2.18.2_1 (with 
gnome2-power-tools). All the GNOME-relevant ports are up to date as of 
last night.  X seems to be fine: I can use twm without any trouble and in 
the initial stages of running a GNOME session everything looks good, the 
resolution is OK, my monitor doesn't start to smoke, nothing bad happens. 
GDM works fine and looks just as it did before I upgrade X.  Xorg.log 
shows no errors.  The problem comes later.

When I log in from GDM or after using startx, the GNOME splash image shows 
up and says it's starting something whose name I miss (icon of two 
overlapping windows), then the Panel, then nautilus, then deskbar-applet. 
The root window's background colour is set, the menu bar is there, and 
some applets are put in place.  So far so good.

I set it up to swallow an xlock, and usually it creates an xclock while 
starting the session, just leaves it sitting there, then starts another 
xlock instance, swallows it, and I remove the first one by hand.  Right 
now, it's crashing before creating the second xlock.  When it crashes, it 
may bring down my entire machine and actually turn it right off, which 
seems surprisingly vindictive.  There is no useful error output that I can 
see.

I tried removing the gnome-swallow, gnome-applets, and deskbar-applet 
ports (individually, not all together), and the problem still happened. 
I tried starting a Failsafe GNOME session, but it crashed even then.

I don't know exactly what is causing the problem, and I'm not sure how to 
narrow it down any more.  Is there some way I can make it step through 
each applet and so on while it's making the session?  Can I disable things 
from the command-line before starting a session?

If I have to wipe all my GNOME config information, I don't mind too much. 
What's the best way to do that?  I moved all the .gnome directories out of 
the way as a test, but everything happened as it had before.  Would I need 
to wipe .gconf*?

>From rc.conf:

gnome_enable="YES"
#gdm_enable="NO" # For when I tested with startx and not GDM
dbus_enable="YES"
polkitd_enable="YES"
hald_enable="YES"

uname -a: FreeBSD sherlock.miskatonic.org 6.2-STABLE FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE 
#3: Fri Mar 16 02:04:00 EDT 2007 
buff at sherlock.miskatonic.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SHERLOCK  i386

Thanks,

Bill
-- 
William Denton, Toronto : www.miskatonic.org www.frbr.org www.openfrbr.org