OK, I narrowed it down a bit. I created a new account, abe2, since root worked, and gnome loaded fine. So, I renamed my /home/abe to a backup and recreated abe.
It still happened, and in fact, it had kept some of my gnome configuration! So, I assumed it was storing stuff in /tmp. I wiped /tmp/* and /home/abe/* and logged in again as abe, and it now works fine. So, either I had a corrupt file in /tmp or there was something in dapper 6.06 that the new gnome-vfs-daemon didn't like... Unfortunately, I don't know which file it was... -- gnome-vfs-daemon crashes https://launchpad.net/bugs/57953 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs