Gnome 2.22: Daemons gone wild

[Frank Jahnke]

I have had substantial problems with Gnome-related daemons and processes
misbehaving since the gettext upgrade and Gnome version bump.  Before
that everything worked as it should.  Now things are wild, and it does
not matter whether I start things using gnome_enable or the individual
daemons in /etc/rc.conf.

hald no longer starts, but does so from the command line.  trackerd
starts, and it should not (I usually have to kill trackerd three or four
times before it gives up).  bonobo on start-up consumes one of my two
CPUs.  pdftotex starts for some unknown reason, and it too consumes one
CPU and must be killed a couple of times before it stays in its grave.

Adding the clock to the top panel causes is unsuccessful, though adding
it after gnome loads works on the second try (the first attempt also
crashes).  Sometimes that audio volume loads; sometimes it does not.

I forced a rebuild of all of gnome ("portupgrade -Rf gnome2") yesterday,
and nothing changed.  I am on 6.3R-p1.

Suggestions on how to resolve these baffling issues would be most
appreciated.

Frank