For some reason, I think this may be related to my compilation of the 2.6.10 kernel from 2.6.7, whenever I try to start gnome it gets part of the way through the startup, then it says gnome-settings-deamon quit and it keeps trying to restart it, but it doesn't help at all.

All of the other window managers I use work fine with the new kernel, but apperantly gnome doesn't like something related to ALSA.

This is the last message I get when I try to start it:
ALSA lib pcm.c:1908snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM hw:0
gnome-settings-daemon: conf.c:3110: snd_config_update_free: Assetion 'update->count > 0 && update->finfo' failed.

I don't use an audio device on this computer, so I skipped that part of kernel configuration. Does gnome need me to set up my audio devices with ALSA before I use it?

-Thanks in advance.

It's happening to me too.
But I have a fresh, stock Slack 10.1 with the default 2.4.29 kernel installed.
In KDE everything works perfectly.
This is fresh isntall, with almost nothing new installed so something is definitely not right.
Oh well.

AH! Found out how to fix it. So long as you're ok with recompiling the kernel, this is easy.

Just recompile the kernel with support for a dummy (/dev/null) ALSA driver.

Hope this helps