strange gconfd bonobo problems with fc1

[John McBride]

We are having a couple of problems at work with our fc1 machines maybe 
someone has seen these? (We use NIS, nfs, ntp and dhcp services, but 
even local accounts exhibit these problems). Oddly, my home network is fine.

Problem 1: they seem to just hang forever on logout. The user display 
just hangs there, and the cursor moves, but nothing will activate. 
letting it sit like that, it takes about 2-4 minutes to finally logout.

ctrl-alt-backspace restarts x, but that's not too elegant.

Problem 2: problems with either the .gconfd or .gconf home directories 
getting corrupted. in this case, the problem is on login. x starts but 
it is in the same condition as above--the cursor moves but nothing will 
activate. ctrl-alt-backspace works, but there are instances in the 
process table of gnome-panel and some kind of "bonobo activation 
server". killing them sometimes helps, but strangely it still shows up 
in the ptable and if I kill it again the system says "no such process".

rm -rf'ing the .gconfd and .gconf of the affected users fixes them up, 
but they have to redo their preferences, etc.

it seems likely to me that the gnome demons are trying to clean up on 
logout, and out of frustration we ctrl-alt-backspace, and this leaves 
the config files corrupted.

I'd say we have nfs problems except our apps move a lot of data through 
nfs and we are having no problems with corruption.

Any ideas are welcome. The machines are kept updated with "yum update" 
every week or two. We've had these issues from the beginning tho, just 
seeing them more now that we have more machines on the net.

When I watch the connection on ethereal it just seems to hang for a long 
time, no packets either way, then finally times out (or completes) and 
exits.

Sometimes the machines log out just fine, too...

Thanks,
John