gconfd startup failure

One of our users keeps getting gconfd startup error messages on login - 
and other errors resulting in an unusable setup as a consequence. Other 
users can log in on the same system with no problems. gconftool-2 
--shutdown does not help, neither does .gconf or .gconfd removal. We 
even tried changing the setup for login on an alternate home directory, 
but no luck.

All this on a Red Hat Linux 9 system.

What might cause this?

- Toralf