Gedit doesn't like root

[gilpel at altern.org]

I just removed Totem to repalce it by MPlayer, which is suggested by
Radio-Canada to read its video. I had many applications open, maybe I
should have closed them... It finally took more than half an hour to
install Mplayer and this, with yum-fastestmirror installed!

Anyways, it might have nothing to do but, when I tried to edit
/etc/yum/pluginconf.d/fastestmirror.conf as root afterwards, -- I thought
verbose mode was preferable -- I received about 3 full screens of the
following text:

"GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes
are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale
NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details -  1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not
receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not
send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply
timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)"

There seems to be a little problem here.