dbus and the bus address

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

Following a recent upgrade (sorry, I can't be more precise), I'm
getting the dbus error:

 Unable to determine the address of the message bus

from a number of applications at start-up, including at least:

  f-spot (which fails to start as a consequence)
  rhythmbox
  epiphany-browser

I'm not sure whether to regard this as a problem with dbus, or as a
problem with the individual packages, but I suppose the fact that it
affects at least three programs that interact with dbus suggests some
more general problem. There are bug-reports of this type against a
number of the packages, but at least one of those bug-reports was
closed when it was discovered that the reporter did not have:

   use-session-dbus

in the file /etc/X11/Xsession.options

But I do have that option set (the file 
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  381 2006-06-28 10:39 75dbus_dbus-launch is in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/)

dbus-launch reports:

DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS='unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-ZX6wCeW4AK,guid=4c424d457a1e5bf2fc4e9ca0e2381f00';
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID=6718;

and if I then set the environment-variable DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS by
hand (using the value supplied by dbus-launch), all three applications
start without error.  But it presumably shouldn't be necessary to set
the environment variable by hand?

I'd be grateful for any help, and I'd be glad to do what I can to help
resolve the issue,

Jim

Versions: dbus: 0.94-1
          f-spot: 0.2.1-1.1
          epiphany: 2.14.3-3
          rhythmmbox: 0.9.6-1