Comment 10 for bug 854717

It is the loading of libpower.so in src/panel/panel.c which triggers the early gnome-settings-daemon.

As a workaround for beta-2 I suggest to just disable this from indicators[]:

        // Reboot, shut down, ...
        "/usr/lib/indicators3/6/libpower.so",

The comment is misleading, reboot, shutdown etc. are done from the session indicator. The power indicator only shows your battery charge. While that's good to have as well, it's not crucial IMHO.

A more proper fix is probably to start the panel process after the gnome-settings-daemon one. It's not that simple, though, because you actually need to wait until g-s-d has registered to the bus (and time out in case it crashes). It might also be possible to fix the power indicator to not depend on settings-daemon, but that also seems out of scope for beta-2.