root wierdness

[Dean Elhard <dean-elhard home com>]

I am getting the following strange behaviour:
  - I log in and run gnome, but many applications such as gedit and
    gnome-terminal die whenever anything is selected from a menu,
    reporting a broken pipe. Other than that they seem to work fine.
  
  - When I log in as root, this doesn;t happen.

I ran strace on gnome-terminal, the last thing in the trace is a
failed write of the string "gtk-events/activate\0\0\0\0..." 128
bytes long to file descriptor 3 which seems to be a socket connected
to port 5001.  Immediately before the failed write was a successfull
write to the same file descriptor of the 4 bytes "\16\0\0\0"

I didn't have this behaviour before I re-built all of the RPMs from
the tarballs, so it seems likely that something there is screwed up,
but I haven't been able to find anything which should be affected by
the root access, or that has changed from the previous RPMs.

Does this behaviour ring any bells for anyone?

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