Enabling sounds, and then disabling sounds leaves a custom.conf that still plays sounds. I used gdmsetup to enable sounds for Ready, Successful, and Failed. The sounds worked, but due to bug 184024 I wanted to disable the sounds, so I unchecked the sound boxes. This left my custom.conf with: SoundOnLogin=false SoundOnLoginFile=/usr/share/sounds/startup3.wav SoundOnLoginSuccessFile=/usr/share/sounds/info.wav SoundOnLoginFailureFile=/usr/share/sounds/email.wav The only sound that played after this was the LoginSuccess. In order to stop that from playing I had to comment out all 4 lines. (maybe didn't need all 4, haven't nailed it down yet). Then no sounds at all. So either gdm isn't reading the custom.conf file correctly, or gdmsetup isn't cleaning up the file correctly.
adding to fc7target
hmm, I can't get sound to work at all in gdm
Yeah, I haven't tried for a long time. The problem may have changed. I also disabled sounds due to esd getting really confused when I go from say work to home and my ip address changes. esd will completely get lost in the weeds and prevent new windows from showing on the desktop until I kill -9 esd. But alas, that's a different problem.
The upstream bug has been closed, so I assume this is better now.