Appearance prefs 'reset' after about 30 seconds

[NoOp]

On 05/18/2010 09:04 AM, Robert Spanjaard wrote:
> On Sun, 16 May 2010 22:21:21 +0100, sam tygier wrote:
> 
>> On 16/05/10 21:25, Robert Spanjaard wrote:
>>> When I start my computer, Ubuntu 10.04 boots just fine. But about 30
>>> seconds after my desktop appears, the appearance goes from this...
>>>
>>> http://www.arumes.com/temp/S1.png
>>>
>>> ...to this...
>>>
>>> http://www.arumes.com/temp/S2.png
>>>
>>> As soon as I start Prefs/Appearance, most of the settings are restored
>>> without setting anything. Running the Appearance program is enough to
>>> restore most. Nautilus (and the right-click menu on the desktop) seems
>>> to be the only exception; it doesn't change back to the appearance I
>>> selected, but stays in the looks of the second screenshot.
>>>
>>> It's 10.04, 64 bits, proprietary ATI driver, and visual effects are all
>>> switched off. I didn't have this problem with 9.10, and I don't have
>>> the problem with 10.04 NE on my netbook.
>>>
>>>
>> looks like gnome-settings-daemon is crashing, and the theme falls back
>> to gtk defaults. there could be an interesting message in
>> ~/.xsession-errors
>> 
>> can you put it on http://paste.ubuntu.com/
> 
> http://paste.ubuntu.com/435606/
> 
> I'm sorry for the delay, but the error didn't occur at all yesterday.
> And today, after two boots with the error, the third attempt booted as it 
> should again. So it doesn't happen all the time.
> This did enable me to extract the part of xsession-errors that's linked 
> to the error, which is pasted as requested.
> 

I experienced a similar issue following updates the other day. In my
case all applications except nautilus would abide by the theme(s), but
nautilus would do exactly as yours did. I kept the bookmarks of the
issues and finally sorted it out by doing the suggestion in comment #22
of this bug report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/500417
 <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/500417/comments/22>

<quote>
workaround that worked for me: I removed  ~/.gconf/apps/nautilus and
killed the nautilus process. After that the problem went away.
</quote>

Suggestion: rather than remove ~/.gconf/apps/nautilus instead just
rename it so that you can go back to your original if necessary. You can
do this via nautilus, or via the terminal:

$ mv ~/.gconf/apps/nautilus ~/.gconf/apps/x-nautilus-x

Also see:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/516384
[duplicate of 500417 & note the screenshots]

I suspect that it what you've run into.

Added note: I do not experience the issue on other users on the same
machine, so the problem most likely is somewhere in the user
config/profile files.