Comment 12 for bug 146399

I was also running into this problem I will attach my strace,backtrace,and valgrind files. I was eventually able to rectify this problem by going through my /var/log/dpkg.log and backing out changes(using apt-get to remove and downgrade packages) untill it worked again. At that point I was able to redo the apt-get update; apt-get upgrade to get back to the latest glibc and then reinstalled all the extra packages one by one.. Eventually I got all my dev packages reinstalled with gnome-terminal working. I suspect it was an undetected lib error on upgrade/install between libc6 and some dev packages that was causing gnome-terminal to bus error.

The commands required to fix this for me was(note I have combined multiple apt-get install lines at the end into a single install line since there was no problem with any of the individual packages):

sudo apt-get remove libsdl1.2-dev
(was not allowing downgrade of libc package untill I first removed it)
sudo apt-get install libc6=2.6.1-1ubuntu9
(downgrade of recent libc update, also removed additional dev libs see remove_packages details, at this point gnome-terminal was working again)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
(upgraded back to libc6 2.6.1-1ubuntu10 with gnome-terminal still working, I thought for sure it was an error in glibc since that is about when it stopped working)
sudo apt-get install libsdl-dev libsdl-console-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl-stretch-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsmpeg-dev libsdl1.2-dev g++ ghc6 libaa1-dev libasound2-dev libesd0-dev libaudiofile-dev libhdf4g-dev libdirectfb-dev libpng12-dev libxft-dev libtiff4-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev zlib1g-dev libcaca-dev libslang2-dev openalpp-cvs-doc libosgal-cvs-dev libopenalpp-cvs-dev libvorbis-dev libflac-dev libogg-dev libmikmod2-dev libglu1-xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libexpat1-dev libreadline5-dev libncurses5-dev libjpeg62-dev ubuntu-minimal libc6-i686 libstdc++6-4.1-dev libc6-dev g++-4.1
(NOTE I installed each of these one at time testing gnome-terminal afterward to find the culprit)