[Bug 38117] dapper flight 6 - gnome initialization incomplete (sets up useless sesion - no "menu" bars)

[David Horner]

Public bug reported:

Frequently after the live boot, the top and bottom gnome menu bars disappear.
  That is , sometimes they briefly appear, and other times the screen switches to a tty before they appear.
  by alt-F7 I get back to the gnome screen, but can do essentially nothing (as right click menu at best allows creating a launcher, and I don't know my way around that sufficiently to do anything.

  If I leave the system alone (that is not switch back to alt-F7), the system completely hangs.
  I suspect this is because the screensaver is invoked, but it hasn't been correctly initialized,
  and hence my keyboard and mouse are hung up (yeah, I know, idle speculation by the uninformed,
 but psychologically it helped me persevere).

  Anyway, if I do ctl-alt-F2 (or the like to get a valid tty prompt) and kill process 5219 (the first gdm)
 and then re invoke gdm, then all is well in the gnome world.

 Here I go speculating again ---
 I suspect that the problem here is one of timing.
  Gnome has (once) successfully come up. I believe I was alt-F#, and ctl-alt-F#ing at the time.
 I suspect the stream of tty setups caused gnome initialization to fail.
  However, I know too little about such things, and as little about how to find it out.
  so I captured what I know I can, the dmesg, and a ps -ef listing before and after the gdm kill and restart,
  and hope that someone more knowledgeable and skilled than I will have a look, and hopefully fix.

  I am quite willing to do more forensics if someone can direct me as to
what to do.

** Affects: gnome-session (Ubuntu)
       Severity: Normal
       Priority: (none set)
         Status: Unconfirmed

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dapper flight 6 - gnome initialization incomplete (sets up useless sesion - no "menu" bars)
https://launchpad.net/bugs/38117