I was having the same problem with 4.3, so I did some digging and found a post on the Dream Linux forum that helped me.
http://dreamlinuxforums.org/index.php?topic=3021.0
Basically all you have to do is run
Code:
chown <username> -R .config
in a terminal from your home folder. Apparantly the Google Earth installer messes up some ownership/permissions for some per-user config files.