From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050524 Fedora/1.0.4-4 Firefox/1.0.4 Description of problem: It appears that something is getting saved incorrectly to the gnome settings. I think it's just the panel (although the most recent recurrence lost my background setting, too). The result is that *nothing* shows up, either in the top panel (where the menus, notification areas, clock, etc. should be by default) or in the bottom panel (that should contain open windows and the workspace switcher). I tried archiving off the .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome, .gnome2, and .gnome2_private directories and deleting them, then restarting, but when I came back, most everything was restored: all the notifications and monitors I've added were there but the launchers were not (the menus and open window areas were restored). Trying to re-add anything by hand does not work. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-panel-2.10.1-10 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Choose to save configuration. 2. Log out 3. Log back in Additional info:
Hmm, not as straightforward as I thought. With a completely blown away config (as described above), most recently it did not recur, though it did several times before this. I restored .gconf and .gconfd from the archive of my old config (ie without .gnome, .gnome2, and .gnome2_private) and, other than the missing launchers, it works now. So something was corrupted in there, I believe.
If it happens again, try doing: gconftool-2 --config-source=xml:readonly:~/.gconf --direct --dump / > dump.xml and attach it here. Can't really do anything about the bug until we have some idea where the problem is. Marking as WORKSFORME, but please do re-open with more details if you manage to reproduce.
Recurring now on every login; running the above command produces: Failed to load source "xml:readonly:~/.gconf": Couldn't resolve address for configuration source: Bad address `xml:readonly:~/.gconf': `~' is an invalid character in a configuration storage address GConf-ERROR **: file gconftool.c: line 828 (main): assertion failed: (err == NULL) aborting... Trace/breakpoint trap
Turns out this is a bug of bug #160439, I think *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 160439 ***