gnome-ditem-edit error dialog

["Carmine F. Greco" <cgreco1 nc rr com>]

I'm trying to port the QuickLaunch applet from GNOME 1.4 to GNOME2.  I've got some code that creates a  gnome_ditem_edit and adds it to a dialog's vbox, then does a gtk_widget_show_all on the dialog.  When I execute this code I get an error dialog with the following message 
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An error occurred while loading or saving configuration information for quicklaunch. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.

Bad key or directory name:
 "/apps/gnome-settings/The Quick Launch Applet/history-command": ` ' is an invalid character in key/directory names
Bad key or directory name:
 "/apps/gnome-settings/The Quick Launch Applet/history-desktop-icon": ` ' is an invalid character in key/directory names
----

The string "The Quick Launch Applet" seems to come from the third parameter passed to PANEL_APPLET_BONOBO_FACTORY.

Despite the error message, everything seems to work fine after I dismiss the dialog.  Any idea/suggestions on how to get rid of this error dialog?  Thanks.

Carmine