I did an upgrade (first in a few weeks) last night, and now I can't start Galeon. Galeon puts up a popup saying,

Cannot find a schema for galeon preferences. Check your gconf setup, look at galeon FAQ for more info

Which confuses me because I never don't care about gconf and didn't intentionally do anything with it. But OK. So now I need gconf working.

Well I wound up at [link|http://galeon.sourceforge.net/support/answers.php?faq=gconf|the FAQ] and then I wandered into /etc/gconf and saw that I have the files that they suggest. So I go to run gconftool --shutdown as suggested and get,

Shutdown error: Failed to contact configuration server (a likely cause of this is that you have an existing configuration server (gconfd) running, but it isn't reachable from here - if you're logged in from two machines at once, you may need to enable TCP networking for ORBit)

WTF? I am using a single machine. I have /etc/orbitrc installed, and it is set to use sockets. That seems reasonable. After appropriate invocations of ps I see that I have /usr/lib/gconf2/gconfd-2 running, but nothing resembling ORBit. I've barely heard of ORBit, but I am guessing that it got messed up in my last upgrade somehow, and that is the cause of my problems.

I'm on Debian testing.

Thoughts? Guesses? Suggestions?

Thanks,
Ben

PS Can anyone give a good reason why GNOME is reproducing all of the braindeadness of the registry, except with networked everything to give it additional modes of failure? This problem would be less irritating if I thought that it was coming up because of someone trying to add something that is actually useful...