Comment 14 for bug 430981

With help from Longinus00 on IRC I have figured out what is happening here and why the workaround actually works.

The problem is the gconf plugin is getting loaded via command line. As of the first compiz 0.8.3 packages plugins loaded from command line cannot be disabled, ever. Since something is adding gconf to the command line and ccp is already there the two plugins fight and they both lose, neither one gets to save your settings. But what is adding gconf to the command line?

If you have every switched WMs in older versions of Ubuntu the key /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager will still be set to "gnome-wm" since we can't change keys for users. gnome-wm does start compiz with gconf and thus we get this bug. This is why switching to metacity and back to compiz via Appearance Properties fixes the problem, it sets this key to "compiz" as it should be.

gnome-wm seems to have some code that is supposed to detect this case and update the key for you but for whatever reason it is obviously not working. Moving bug to gnome-session package since that is where gnome-wm is located.