Gnome 2.14 crashes in Etch after upgrade

[Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk>]

I dist-upgraded Etch (Testing) today. Attempting to open a Gnome session 
caused Gnome to abort and made other virtual terminals unusable (they 
all had a screen with a coloured pattern and no prompt or text). This 
was true for any existing user with a gnome configuration. Newly-created 
users did not have this problem.

I can solve the problem by deleting each user's ~/.gconf file (mv .gconf 
.gconf.old). Each user must then login and rebuild their preferences (eg 
theme, panel applets etc) from scratch. Is there an easier way?

Chris.