I use Ubuntu 10.04, and every now and then I start getting the following messages when starting gedit, for example.
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: Server ping error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0)
I did some searching and read suggestions to
rm ~/.dbus* or
mv ~/.gconfd/saved_state ~/.gconfd/.saved_state but these do not work for me.