Comment 22 for bug 588155

I actually think we are seeing a few different bugs that all result in gnome-settings-daemon crashing.

The bug I originally reported, which happened to me on 2 separate computers, with very different hardware (other than the fact they where both x86_64 installs), seemed to stop occurring on both systems. I'm guessing some update rolled out that fixed it. I have had almost no problems with gsd since then.

In my original case there was no gnome-do, docky, sun-java6 or any other programs other than the defaults. I don't think those would cause any problems since afaik gsd is just for giving settings to applications, it doesn't really care what the settings are.

The main problem is that there isn't any way to get debugging output of gnome-settings-daemon-dbgsym if it crashes at login making reporting bugs close to impossible.

gdb does support attaching to an already running process. Perhaps it's possible to use a script in a loop that keeps looking for it running and tried to attach then dump a backtrace somewhere (or runs in a screen so you can get the backtrack yourself)? If you getting crashing some time after login then it should be no problem to attach.

The following could work:
while true; do; PID=`pidof gnome-settings-daemon`; if test $PID; then; sudo gdb attach --pid=$PID; sleep 1; fi; done

Just /etc/init.d/gdm stop, ctrl+alt+f2 to virtual terminal. Execute the above as root (it would probably be easier to save it to a script file first and run from that, it also might be worth while running it in a 'screen' session so you can attach to it from within a Xorg terminal). Then restart gdm. After gnome-settings-daemon crashes, ctrl+alt+f2 back to the VT and take a screen dump.

The question is if it will connect to the process in time.