Gnome-session hangs at splash screen

[William McKee <william@knowmad.com>]

Hi folks,

I have just updated my workstation from Woody running backports of Gnome
2.2 to Sid which installed Gnome 2.4. I am now having a problem getting
past the new Gnome splashscreen. Basically, gnome-session hangs at the
splash screen.

I found some messages from about a year ago that detailed problems with
libbonobo-activation4. However, those bugs are now archived in the BTS.
Nonetheless, I tried to downgrade to the 1.0.3 versions of the bonobo
libraries. However, these no longer appear to be available so that did
not work.

Finally, I found a few recent threads in this newsgroup which describe
somewhat similar problems to what I am having. I tried removing and
reinstalling gnome-session. At one time, I could get gnome-session
started from a terminal in IceWM. However, gnome-panel wasn't installed.
When I installed gnome-panel and logged out of IceWM, I'm back with the
hangs at splashscreen.

Next, I tried removing and installing both gnome-session and gnome-core.
At first, I didn't even get to the splashscreen; subsequent restarts
show the splash screen but continue to hang.

If I run `apt-get -f update`, I am told that bonobo-activation and
libbonobo-activation4 have been kept back. When I try to install either
one, I am told there is no available version and that libbonobo2-0
replaces it. If I try to install libbonobo2-0, I'm told that it already
is the most recent version.

I seem to be in some kind of bad dependency loop here. Any suggestions
on what to try besides rebuilding my system? I'm not getting much info
in my .xsession-errors log.


Thanks in advance,
William

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