gconf problems

[Rick Ziegler <rickziegler attbi com>]

Hi all-
    I have a RedHat 9 machine that is exhibiting very strange behavior.

1)   in gconf-editor, no keys show up under 
/schema/desktop/gnome/interface.  However, the file 
/etc/gconf/schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schema is present, and the 
rpm to which it belongs verifies.  When a new user logs in, the keys 
that are supposed to be found there are not created properly - they are 
blank, and in gconf-editor you can even set the type of value for the 
keys... 

2)    Another consequence of this is when I choose "preferences->Themes" 
from the gnome menu, I receive an error dialog: "The default theme 
schemas could not be found on. This means that you probably don't have 
metacity installed, or that your gconf is configured incorrectly."

3)   I've been living with this for awhile, as there hadn't been too 
many negative consequences.  However most recently when I logged in I 
received dozens of error dialog boxes.  The font of the text in the 
boxes was too small to be read, the splash screen did not appear.  The 
desktop background was black, instead of my usual wallpaper.  Only the 
menu panel appeared, and it did not have my usual assortment of launchers 
and applets.  The font on the menu panel was the same illegible 
one-point font.

I logged out and moved away my .gconf directory and logged back in, but 
that did not seem to change anything.  As I write this, it dawned on me 
the I forgot to kill gconfd-2...  Any way, what could cause all these 
problems?  Most especially, how can I restore all my settings?  I ended 
up moving my entire home directory to a backup location...

Thanks for any help-

Rick