System restore progresses, new problems seen

[Kevin O'Gorman]

After a few harrowing weeks, my rebuild of my decade-old server has
gotten to the point that Ubuntu 11.04 boots up and it's serving my web
pages.  Whew!

There are, however, one or two problems, however.  On bootup, a dialog
appears with a message I wrote down as
    The config defaults for gnome-power-manager
    have not been installed correctly.
   Contact your computer administrator.   (Of course, I'm the computer
administrator and I have no idea what to do about this.)
In addition, a bit later in bootup and on all attempts at a user GUI
login, another appears:
    There is a problem with the configuration server.
    (/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-chaek-2 exited 256)
And the login attempt fails.  That's what makes this one urgent.  No
user graphical logins.

The problem occurs for a brand-new user account as well as inherited
ones.  Non-graphical logins are okay.   Strangely, if I create a root
password, root can log in graphically.
The user cannot log in if I delete all dotfiles and directories from
the home directory.  Neither does it work to copy over all of root's
dotfiles and directories and change ownership.

Note that this is a restored backup of the system as it was, at the
same release level but on vastly different hardware.  So if there was
special configuration to be done on installation, it did not get
re-done for the new machine.  This is a fairly heavily configured
system, and I really really don't want to re-do it.

This may be all one problem originating with the gnome-power-manager,
but I have already done a reinstall.  It does not help.

Any ideas what I should look at now?

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD