Bug #1943 workaround didn't work; may be a different bug...

[Ben Novack]

My chronology:

1) I had a working desktop under the Warty prerelease CD - sound
included - although no net access due to not having xsupplicant, and
usb drive mounting not working.
2) I performed an upgrade at a friend's cable modem.
3) Thereafter, when logging into Gnome, I would be presented with a
blank blue background and a cursor, and nothing else. It looked a lot
like bug #1943, gnome not starting if sound hardware not detected.
4) I performed another upgrade via the 10-5 daily CD to get the
patched control panel, but that didn't fix things.
5) I implemented the workaround Matt Zimmerman cited in the bug #1943 - namely,

gconftool2 -s -t bool /schemas/desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds false

That didn't fix things either. So I may not in fact be dealing with
#1943. Any ideas?