Can't login into Gnome after updates yersterday (10.04

[seanh]

Hey,

I booted up my computer today and found that I cannot log into the
Gnome or Failsafe Gnome desktop sessions. The computer boots fine, GDM
seems to work fine, but on logging in it just shows the GDM background
and nothing else, nothing happens. My desktop background doesn't
appear, panels don't appear, right-clicking and left-clicking does
nothing, etc. I see one notifier message that reads:

"The configuration defaults for Gnome Power Manager have not been
installed correctly."

That's all. I installed updates before shutting down yesterday, so I
suspect that might be the problem. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04.

I am able to login to an Openbox session. That works, although it
spits out the following error message about gconf:

"GConf error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible
causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you
have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See
http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details —  1: Could
not send message to GConf daemon: Message did not receive a reply
(timeout by message bus))"

Evidently some of the Gnome services that Openbox uses have failed to
start, for example all of the fonts and icons look wrong (normally
gnome-settings-daemon would handle those), and many applications
complain about loading their settings. For example, GVim says:

"An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information
for gvim. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly."

"Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that
you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS
locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for
information. (Details —  1: Could not send message to GConf daemon:
Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus))"

Can anyone give me a clue?

Thanks