Weird GConf problem

I just spent several hours trying to recover from a weird GConf problem on 
Red Hat 9. I think I'll just include the text from our internal Bugzilla 
entry to explain what happened; see below. Can anyone explain this 
behaviour? Note that we've seen this problem on at least two different 
hosts (but on one of them, we just reinstalled the OS), so it's probably 
reproducible.

- Toralf

--
Just had a really weird problem with GNOME2 setup under Red Hat Linux 9.

Symptoms:
- Black desktop background.
- Panel menu icons missing
- Real desktop icons replaced by simple "sheet-of-paper" icon.
- Most panel applets missing.
- Selection of Preferences->Theme would result in the message.

The default theme schemas could not be found on.  This means that you 
probably
don't have metacity installed, or that your gconf is configured 
incorrectly.

Possible cause:
Login is root w/ root home directory set to "/" rather than "/root" (which 
also
caused a lot of complaint about GConf keys etc., and the eventual failure 
of
apps like the panel.)

It turned out that some of the config files under /etc/gconf had been 
damaged
somehow; the system may have tried to update these rather than root's 
personal
files during the login attempt.

The problem was resolved by:
1. find /etc/gconf -mtime -1 -exec ls -ld {} \;
    To locate the updated files.
2. Identify what "owner" software package each of these files (or rather, 
the
matching gconf key), then re-install using rpm -Uvh <rpm file for package> 
--force.

2) seemed hard at first since the gconf data files are added by RPM 
postinstall
scripts, and not included in the file lists. However, it turned out that 
would
usually be a file /etc/gconf/schemas/<dir>.schemas for each of the changed
files, where <dir> is the last component of the file's path, and that file 
would
be owned by the correct package (which could be found 'rpm -qf ...')

Packages gnome-applets, gnome-panel and libgnome definitely needed
re-installation. A number of others, like nautilus, gnome-session, 
gnome-desktop
  and metacity were updated more or less at random before I found a good 
way to
track down the damaged packages; that may or may not have contributed to 
the
resolution of the problem.

Note that root home directory now has been changed back to the default 
setting
of "/root". We've been using "/" in the past because that's what we're
accustomed to from older Unix systems, and we may have required different
platforms to have the same home directory setup in the past because of 
using
NIS. root user isn't shared via NIS these days, though.