On Sat, 24 Apr 2010, Mark Mahabir wrote:

> I completely removed an account for one particular user, then recreated it 
> from scratch. All looked fine until she copied back in the .gconf and .gconfd 
> subdirectories into her home area from the backup I had made; When logging 
> in, the blue GNOME box is missing the logo and no desktop backgrounds can be 
> set unless they are PNG. Also the title in a minimised firefox window on the 
> taskbar stretches across other open programs in the taskbar so they become 
> unreadable.
>
> However, simply deleting .g* subdirectories does not remove the issue.
>
> In two other cases after recreating accounts from scratch, one showed no 
> improvement whatsoever, whereas in the second case the issue disappeared and 
> then came back later when the user attempted to modify the workspace 
> switcher.
>
> I even had the users completely rewrite .login and .cshrc files in case these 
> were screwing something up.
>
> The new server I installed is an 'everything' install SL4.8, and all worked 
> fine on the old server.
>
> Any suggestions greatly appreciated, no matter how off the wall!

Recap:
The desktop machines have been running SL4.8 for a while and didn't 
change, but the fileserver was updated from SL4.small to SL4.8 at
the time that the problems appeared ?

The users log into the desktop machine with a network mounted
home directory ?

Thus the gui on the file-server should be irrelevant,
but any (minor?) changes to the gui on the desktop machines
at the same time, or any changes to the network mount options
could be significant.

Things I'd check with the network mount include atime, quota,
root (and other user) squash, group memberships and permissions,
SE-Linux attributes, ...
You are looking for changes in values and whether features are
enabled or disabled.

-- 
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[log in to unmask]	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna