FC6: Desktop Messed Up After Updates

[Eric Mader]

I wrote:
> I did a clean install of FC6 x64. (On VMWare 6.0 Beta on a Vista 
> Ultimate x64 (RTM) host.) When the system came up, it told me there were 
> 156 updates. I applied all the updates except for frysk, which seems to 
> have conflicts w/ the previous version.
> 
> When I rebooted the system, my desktop is completely messed up. All of 
> the panels are gone execpt for one tiny one that has a few of the 
> widgets I had installed the windows have different borders, and the 
> terminal window seems to be larger and uses a different font.

Someone suggested off-list that I try system -> preferences -> themes to 
see if I could restore my desktop by resetting the theme. This resulted 
in a dialog saying that it can't start the theme editor because either 
metacity isn't installed or gconf is messed up.

Yum reports that metacity *is* installed, so I assume that gconf is 
messed up somehow. I've been comparing the setting in ~/.gconf and 
/etc/gconf with those of a running FC5 system, and so far I haven't been 
able to find any differences. Does anyone have any suggestions for where 
to look for the problem?

By comparing w/ the running system, it looks like the window style on my 
broken system has been set to "Traditional".

I looked through /var/log to see if there were any relevant log entries, 
but I didn't see anything that seemed relevant. Is there a log file 
somewhere that might shed some light on what's going on?

Regards,
Eric