I'm having an issue with my window manager. When my system starts, everything is fine, but when a window opens up(ie nautilus, firefox, etc) everything freezes. The only thing that works is my mouse- even when the arrow is hovering over a button, the button doesn't highlight or anything. It's so strange because it's random.
I'm pretty sure it's gnome, bc the only way I'm able to type this is by starting my session with the Terminal(instead of a window manager).

Does anybody know how I can fix this other than reinstaling gnome???

it may be the last option to try out.but it works.try deleting ~/.gnome2 folder and restart the machine.

thank you for your response!
I figured out what it was. I think it's a Gutsy bug, bc i remember having this problem before...it just manifested itself a little differently.
What was happening was, for some reason, completely random, gnome-settings-daemon was not starting - even though it always had before.

i fixed it by setting it to autostart.

What happened last time, was GNOME loaded and looked like "classic gnome" from way back in the day when gnome had no themes and all that. I couldn't figure out why all the folders, menus, desktop, and icons looked so different.

Hello, I have the same problem. How do I autostart gnome-settings-daemon?