With bluez-gnome-0.14-5.fc8, bluetooth-applet is not started at login. The desktop file in /etc/xdg/gnome/autostart does not show up in the session list like the items in /etc/xdg/autostart. Copying bluetooth-applet.desktop to /etc/xdg/autostart seems to make it start up as expected.
As it stands, the Bluetooth Preferences is supposed to determine the behavior of the applet (Always/Never show etc), but since the applet is never started, this doesn't work at all. So we should be starting it by default. I realize that starting the applet on systems where there's no bluetooth hardware is sub-optimal. Someday we should have a smart way of determining when to load the applet, but until then it's easy enough to disable from the Sessions menu.
No, the point is that I moved the desktop file so it's only auto-started under GNOME, as KDE has their own Bluetooth applet-y kind of thing, and I was told by upstream that it should only be started under GNOME (see bug #258721) Moving to gnome-session, as %{_sysconfdir}/xdg/gnome/autostart/bluetooth-applet.desktop should get started automatically.
why should /etc/xdg/gnome/autostart do that? Was this decided somewhere? Right now, we already have /usr/share/gnome/autostart and /etc/xdg/autostart . If you use the former, or put OnlyShowIn=GNOME; and use the latter, do you get the behavior you want?
See gsm_autostart_read_desktop_files() in gsm-autostart.c But I didn't see system_dirs getting reassigned the retval of g_get_system_data_dirs() (great variable name :( ) I'll move it to /usr/share/gnome/autostart
*** Bug 320091 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***