Gnome problems after Rawhide update

[shmuel siegel]

After latest yum update to rawhide (thursday night) I am now getting 
these errors when using gedit
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: Server 
ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/UNKNOWN:1.0)

Other gnome applications have the same error but are less forgiving and 
crash. What has changed, and how do I work around?  I am a little bit 
afraid to reboot if this is going to render the machine unusable. Advice?