Gnome Shell gone horribly wrong - Help!

Hi, I'm new to Arch Linux. I'm using Gnome 3 with Gnome shell, and everything was coming along just fine.
I'm not sure what setting I've changed, but now Gnome Shell fails to startup properly. I mean the top panel is missing, and I can't use it normally. I'm not sure how to describe it, but a lot of the graphical elements are amiss or screwed up. Alt+f2 doesn't work, and docky doesn't show any animations, infact it has a black box around it.
The problems are all visual based, but they're quite severe, I can't move / resize / close windows, sometimes I'm unable to type in the terminal.
I know that my startup items are loading as Conky, docky and guake are loading. Is there some startup item that I've disabled by mistake? Re-installing gnome-desktop and gnome-shell didn't help.
If I type
gnome-shell --replace
in the terminal, everything becomes fine and my normal desktop is restored.
Is there anyway I can diagnose this problem and sort it out?
Thanks in advance.
[EDIT] - I managed a workaroudn by adding
gnome-shell --replace
to my list of startup items. But it's pretty fragile, can someone help me out ?
Last edited by Paanini (2011-12-31 12:30:38)

Paanini wrote:So GNOME looks at either ~/.config/autostart OR ~/.xinitrc for startup?
I assume you mean "startup application" like Conky etc. with "startup". AFAIK, GNOME only looks at the ordinary desktop files in ~/.config/autostart when it starts up. Those desktop files are nothing else than simple text files that are compatible with the default parsing engine that ships with Glib, the backend of GNOME. Go check them out with a text editor.
You only need .xinitrc if you start X, a separate thing mind you, via startx or the like. If you start X without a display manager like illustrated in the wiki and as I prefer to do it, you can often achieve the same results by editing either .xinitrc or playing around with the application gnome-session-properties. The GUI way is perhaps safer as GNOME is already loaded when your startup apps are executed.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Start_X_at_boot
Finally, here's my .xinitrc for an example.
#!/bin/sh
# Fix the cursor theme and touchpad sensitivity
xsetroot -cursor_name Adwaita &
synclient VertScrollDelta=2000 &
exec ck-launch-session gnome-session

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Message was edited by: NA Smith

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Quote from: spthacker on 20-March-14, 14:58:10
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Type: Volume
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Partition Map Scheme: Unformatted
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Media Type: FUJITSU MHY2200BH Media
Media Type Generic
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Message was edited by: melonpan

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