The timeout for the not responding to the save yourself command phase 2 is way too short. On my old sparc ipx it keeps popping up even if the machine is fully idle. And I mean fully idle, I'm not even moving the mouse ptr. VERY VERY anoying Isn't the idea of a timeout that it is the not regular path, and thus may be quite long?
The short answer is that your machine is too slow, or does not have enough memory to run GNOME. You may want to consider running your system with a simpler desktop environment such as AnotherLevel. The timeout here is 10 seconds, so it is taking more than 10 seconds for some application to respond to the session manager. The problem with making it longer by default, is that if you have a GNOME application stopped in the background, when the user tries to logout, the logout will just hang until this timeout expires. However, you can change the timeout on your system, by editing the the line /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession: exec gnome-session to exec gnome-session --warn-delay 120000 where the number is the timeout in milliseconds. It's also conceivable that there is some bug that is particular to your setup in effect, since I don't understand why you would be getting these messages when your system is sitting there idle. If the above explanation (that your machine is just too slow) doesn't sound reasonable, you may want to provide additional information about the circumstances in which you see these messages.
The system involved is indeed slow, it is an old sparc which is the equivalent of a 486dx33. It isn't swapping so ram is not the problem. And I'm normally using anotherlevel, but I thought gnome should work on it too. I'm happy with the --warn-delay option, it helps me. May I suggest though, that the popup box is made a bit more clear, I've also seen this happen once or twice on a PII 300 if it was heavily loaded, and when that happenend it has managed to confuse the user sitting behind it. So maybe state very clearly that this usual is due to the system being slow temporarily. Besides that you might add the following sentence: Anoyed? try executing gnome-session with --warn-delay <large time in xxxxs> Please fill in xxxxs yourself. This might not really help a newbie, but it would have saved you this bugreport, since then I would have been able to solve it myself ;) I think that it even might be worth a controlcenter applet, making it easy to fix for a newbie too, and allowing easy access to other gnome-session settings too. Anyways just my 2 cents