The theme I have chosen in Ubuntu 10.04 (Ambiance with buttons in the upper right-hand corner) is not applied to the menu bars at boot/login. Menu and title bars should be very dark with a white font. When I boot the computer, the application title bar is correctly formatted, but the main menu bar of gnome and the menu bars of all applications are black font on gray background. When I open the theme selection (in German Einstellungen | Erscheinungsbild, in English likely something like Preferences | Appearance), the correct theme is applied to menu bars without that I have to select the theme again; simply opening the Appearance dialog suffices.

First I did not name my modified theme (showed up as first theme in the theme selection dialog, user modified). In trying to solve the above issue I gave the theme a name, but the strange behaviour persists.

Any hints where I can make the theme automatically and completely applied at boot are appreciated.

Al_

Presumably you did something like this?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1434658

Are other themes persistent?

note: I'd normally select a theme from system > preferences > appearance ... you are right

Yes, limited to the gconf-editor part to move the buttons.

Good point. I just tried it with DarkRoom (as this also has a dark menu bar): no, this theme is also not persistent after a boot; but something is stored anyway, as the DarkRoom theme is preselected and re-applied as soon as I open the appearances dialog, i.e., same behavior as with the modified Ambiance theme.

in gconf-editor, change button_layout value to menu:maximize,minimize,close

Do you only lose settings on reboot? eg. what if you just log out and log back in.
You have said that another dark theme is not persistent, but have not said if any other themes are persistent.

Did unluckily not solve the issue.

After logout - login the selected theme is lost, too. Again, as soon as I open the theme selection dialog, the theme is automatically re-applied.

Also other themes are not persistent.

After you log in, when the theme is not being applied correctly, run this command
and make a note of the output. Then when you've opened Gnome Appearance Preferences and the theme is being applied correctly run that command again. Post the output of both times you ran the command.

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@arizonagroovejet: your advice allowed me to solve the issue.

prior to opening theme dialog (i.e., with wrong theme)
with theme dialog open (and thus correct theme applied)
theme dialog closed
My conclusion: gnome-settings-daemon does not start automatically as it should. So, next, I logged out and in again, then manually started in a terminal window gnome-settings-daemon. The theme was indeed applied! I also get the following error message, that I hope is only caused because the daemon was not started directly during login.
Then I added gnome-settings-daemon to the startup programs in System ¦ Settings. Again logged in and out; and the correct theme is applied.

Many thanks!

In Gnome 2.24 I found that gnome-settings-daemon sometimes failed to start up at login. Most of the time it did, sometimes it didn't. Never did work out why. I did much the same as you did except I created a second start up item for gnome-settings-daemon with a 15 second delay. If you try and start it and it's already running then it exits gracefully so you don't end up with two copies running, but it failed to start on login for some reason, then it starts up with the second attempt.

Hmmm... has been an on-again-off-again thing before.
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-688522.html
... has pretty much the same fix, but a suggestion to edit /etc/hosts so the localhost line includes the hostname as well.

this old bug involves theme messes and suggests adding

#!/bin/sh
exec gnome-session

to the $HOME/.Xsession file.

But every one of these seems to get helpful error messages.
arizonagroovejet - have you files this as a bug at all?