Does gnome forget environment variables?

[Pathbreaker <pathbreaker earthling net>]

Hi 
	I've installed gnome with the latest rpm's on a redhat 5.2 machine. Does
gnome forget environment variables or any such thing? 
	The reason is that I had x11amp working on my system prior to installing
gnome. There it mentioned that in order to make use of a skins directory
other than the default, I had to set an environment variable (SKINS_DIR).
I've put this in the global profiles directory. Under my old
windowmanagers, this worked. But now it does not.