gnome-settings-daemon crashes on resume in VMware

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I'm also having the same problem.

I was able to track the cause of this problem and find a workaround that seems to work.

1 - Cause:

The event deconfiguring-networking is fired whenever "/etc/init.d/networking stop" is called.

If you read the source of /etc/init.d/networking you can see this line:

    initctl emit deconfiguring-networking

D-Bus is configured to stop working whenever the event deconfiguring-networking is fired.

If you read the source of /etc/init/dbus.conf you can see this line:

    stop on deconfiguring-networking

gnome-settings-daemon segfaults whenever D-Bus is killed.

You can see this in the syslog:

   Suspend VMware:
     Oct 25 15:33:54 ubuntu kernel: [ 4317.379836] init: dbus main process (10856) killed by TERM signal
     Oct 25 15:33:54 ubuntu kernel: [ 4317.382712] init: Disconnected from system bus

   Resume VMware:
     Oct 25 15:36:01 ubuntu kernel: [ 4444.539639] gnome-settings-[11048]: segfault at 8 ip b43f15a8 sp bf96b790 error 4 in libpower.so[b43e2000+18000]

2 - How VMware is related to this:

VMware Tools is able to run scripts on the virtual machine poweron, suspend, resume etc.
The script /etc/vmware-tools/scripts/vmware/network calls "/etc/init.d/networking stop" when the machine is suspended.

Since stopping the networking services creates this chain reaction that ends up crashing gnome-settings-daemon, it's always going to happen when the virtual machine gets suspended and VMware Tools runs this network script.

3 - My workaround:

    sudo chmod 644 /etc/vmware-tools/scripts/vmware/network

Yeah, that's all, just remove the "executable" flag on this script. Of course it won't run when you suspend/resume your VM, but I actually didn't miss it. The network in my VM kept working after suspending/resuming.

Of course this is not the solution to the actual problem.

4 - What is the solution?

This problem means that whenever I decide to restart the network by typing

    /etc/init.d/networking stop
    /etc/init.d/networking start

D-bus will get killed and gnome-settings-daemon will segfault. This shouldn't really be the intended behavior.

So the question is, why does D-Bus has to stop working whenever the network goes down?

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I hope I was able to help you figure out this problem.
Meanwhile my workaround seems to be working and brought me peace again. :-)

I am also experiencing this issue with Xubuntu desktop in 11.10.

Light DM becomes unusable, cannot start Ubuntu Software Center or Update Manager, etc - all related to dbus exiting when networking is stopped.

Alonso's workaround works for me, tho I'm not sure it is the proper long term solution.

I'm seeing the same behavior on 11.10 after updating this morning. Alonso's workaround doesn't apply to me as it occurs on my physical system. This is rather frustrating as I'm currently working in a network lab - requiring many networking stops - and each iteration requires a restart!

Same bug on the 12.04 Precise x64.

I'm having the same issue on Ubuntu 12.04 x64. When this happens, my apps all revert to some ugly, grey theme.

I should mention that this bug has nothing to do with VMWare (as the title suggests), and happens on my laptop running as the base operating system.