Galeon and Nautilus stopped working

[Dale Amon <amon@vnl.com>]

A couple evenings ago I did an sid update and went along
with the nautilus-1.1. The install went fine, the results
seemed pretty cool except for a few probs with things that
didn't show up in the browser, but it seemed okay.

The next update, I suddenly found all the nautilus-1.1 under
"obsolete"... which seemed a bit strange. I left things as
they were and did another update.

That evening a browser choked and I had to kill nautilus.
It would not come up, gave errors about GObject or something.

So I decided I'd "go with the flow" and reselect the old
nautilus packages and let them de-install the 1.1 versions.

nautilus still won't come up; and I'm also without galeon
either. Both seem to be dying in a similar way according to
an strace. The child croaks and it then waits forever:

open("/dev/urandom", O_RDONLY)          = 7
read(7, "\315#D<\250I\210\202", 8)      = 8
close(7)                                = 0
mkdir("/dma/home/amon/.gconfd", 0700)   = 0
brk(0x8109000)                          = 0x8109000
open("/dma/home/amon/.gconfd/lock/ior", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
pipe([7, 8])                            = 0
stat64("/usr/bin/gconfd-2", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=41548, ...}) = 0
pipe([9, 10])                           = 0
pipe([11, 12])                          = 0
fork()                                  = 3401
close(10)                               = 0
close(12)                               = 0
close(-1)                               = -1 EBADF (Bad file descriptor)
close(-1)                               = -1 EBADF (Bad file descriptor)
close(-1)                               = -1 EBADF (Bad file descriptor)
wait4(3401, [WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 0], 0, NULL) = 3401
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) ---
sigreturn()                             = ? (mask now [RTMIN])
read(9, "", 8)                          = 0
read(11, "J\r\0\0", 4)                  = 4
read(11, "", 0)                         = 0
read(7, s=


I am seeing the following in /var/log/messages:
Feb 27 22:46:47 mourne gconfd (amon-3402): starting (version 1.1.8), pid 3402 user 'amon'
Feb 27 22:46:47 mourne gconfd (amon-3402): specified class size for type `LINCServer' is smaller than the parent type's `GObject' class size

Which makes me presume there is something funny going on
with gconfd. Has anyone else had this problem?

Note, I am using gdb with afterstep as my wm, the dist is sid and I've
got all the GNUstep libs compiled straight out of cvs. I can't see 
how that would involve Gnome, but just FYI...

Please email me directly at amon@vnl.com because I can't keep up
with all the various groups... LKML alone could keep me from ever
working :-)

Assistance would be appreciated... I'm back to stone tools and flint
knapping with command line file moves and Netscape browsing.