Settings not saved with gconf 2.6.0

I have an NFS mounted home directory.  Our IS department is
being completely unresponsive as to whether they are running
an rpc.lockd or rpc.statd on the home directory server.

I tried gconf-sanity-check-1 script which reported nothing.
There doesn't appear to be a gconf-sanity-check-2 script
anywhere.  This is a Fedora Core 2 install.

I hoping for some guidance on how to get enough debugging
information out of gconfd to tell me definitively that it
my problems are due to the rpc.lockd/rpc.statd description
on http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ about the lock file
problem.  Will the syslog messages indicate a lock file
problem?  If so, what basic keywords should I be looking for
in the log?

I have tried the lock file bypass description as well.  That
doesn't seem to work.  I created an /etc/profile.d/gconf.sh
script and put that into it.  The environment variable is set
according to /proc/<pid>/environ, but there don't appear to
be any files created in /tmp.  Was this method deprecated in
later versions of gconfd?

Thanks,
Robin Holt