While trying to trace gdm, gnome-shell and such in order to discover what's happening in bug 749521 and bug 760044 I have found /usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon using access(2) syscall in a quite strange way. Here's an excerpt of strace output: access("MARK: (null) main: start ", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: (null) parse_args: start ", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon parse_args: end ", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon main: start opening gtk display", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon main: end opening gtk display", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon main: start gnome_settings_manager_new", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon main: end gnome_settings_manager_new", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon gnome_settings_manager_start: start ", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon gnome_settings_manager_start: start initializing plugins", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("MARK: gnome-settings-daemon main: end ", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) It's clearly some DEBUG messages that should be recorded in either .xsession-errors or syslog().
According to a GNOME developer, it is related to http://people.gnome.org/~federico/news-2006-03.html#login-time-2 I think it should be disable by default: desktop user doesn't need this.
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