Strange message at startup

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 13:02 -0600, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> On 03/07/2012 12:14 PM, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> > When Fedora puts up the first login screen after system startup,
> > the screen is black except for the login area which shows the names
> > of the users who might want to log in, and a message partly blocked
> > by the login area which says:
> >
> > A problem h[<login area>]dministrator.
> >
> > The bar at the top of the screen showing the date at the center and
> > three controls at the right is missing.
> >
> > There is (obviously) some problem that I should attend to, but it's
> > not clear what it is.
> >
> > Any suggestions about what's happening or how to view the message?

> It sounds like the selected theme has a problem. But we would need
> to know the display manager you are using, (kdm, gdm, or xdm) before
> giving you the steps to fix it. The error message probably shows up
> in the logs in /var/log or /var/log/(display manager)


Returning to Mikkel's original comment:

The Display Manager is Gnome.  The Desktop Environment is KDE. (Thanks
to Mikkel for clearing up the terminology.)

If I change the Display Manager to KDE, by installing a
file /etc/sysconfig/desktop containing DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE, the problem
disappears completely.  But unfortunately the KDE Display Manager
doesn't work properly.

There certainly seems to be a problem in /var/log/gdm/:0-greeter.log,
which is attached.  The greeter looks in 4 places for the file
gdm-shell.session and doesn't find it in any of them.  The file is, in
fact at
        /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gdm-shell.session
which is included in the rpm
        gdm-3.2.1.1-8.fc16.x86_64
This looks very plausible.  What's broken?  Why isn't the greeter
looking for gdm-shell.session at the place where it is?

At the end of /var/log/gdm/:0-greeter.log is a suspicious looking line:
        (gnome-shell:1570): GConf-WARNING **: Got Disconnected from
        DBus.
Could this have any connection with another problem I've been having:
very s-l-o-w response to certain requests, in particular an attempt to
"Send Link" from firefox?

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