Failed to get a file lock: Failed to lock '~/.gconfd/lock/ior':
 probably another process has the lock, or your operating system has NFS
 file locking misconfigured, or a hard NFS client crash caused a stale
 lock (Resource temporarily unavailable)

This message shows up either in a pop-up window (sometimes with tiny/nearly unreadable fonts), or in ~/.xsession-errors.

Either

• the session failed to obtain valid AFS tokens, and a previous session crashed. Solution: manually run klog, remove the offending lock file (rm ~/.gconfd/lock/ior), restart the session, or

• The AFS volume containing this file is corrupted. Symptoms are that the lock file is "half-visible", it prevents a new file of the same name being created but cannot be accessed or removed. Solution: rename the parent directory (mv ~/.gconfd/lock ~/.gconfd/lock-bad) and restart the session. The corrupted directory eventually will trigger a warning mail from AFS support, which invites you to run a "alvage" command.

CERN has implemented a workaround via the SL_startgnome RPM, which attempts to do some cleanup for full GNOME sessions, and instructs GNOME applications to use a local lock directory.