Comment 25 for bug 269215

This may not be why it happens to everyone, but during beta ISO testing I noticed that this happens if you run out of space on /home. This is a regression of some feature work done in a previous release to make sure the user can always log in even if they run out of disk space (the overflow-tmpfs-on-/tmp init script).

I dug into this a little bit. The cause is that an attempt to mkdir $HOME/.gconf fails due to ENOSPC. This is in the resolve_address function in backends/xml-backend.c, called via gconf_resolve_address from the check_gconf function in gconf/gconf-sanity-check.c.