I’m using Gnome but I use several KDE applications such as Okular and stuff.
And I have installed KDE as well. (I suspect this was causing this problem)
When I close a couple of KDE application windows in short interval, for example, if I close two Okular windows without several seconds of interval, gnome-settings-daemon crashes and my desktop theme reverts to the default (sonar) theme.
When I try to run gnome-settings-daemon in terminal, the session crashes and I have to log back in.
I just have deleted all the unnecessary kde packages which are not essential for running kalarm and okular stuff, and it seems the problem is gone and my desktop is much more responsive. After login it takes less to become working condition and just opening up nautilus seems faster. I just opened up 3 okular windows and close them altogether and no gnome-settings-daemon crash. Is it not recommended to install KDE besides Gnome? It seems my system became much more stable.
Oops … it seems actually gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad was causing the problem. I’m sorry for the false info. I saw in somewhere that removing it fixed similar gnome-settings-daemon problem, (now I could not find where it was) and removed them, and then removed KDE stuff.
I forgot about it until I check /var/log/zypp to show you which packages I have removed, and reinstalled it to see, and after I have it installed, closing bunch of (8) Okular windows again caused gnome-settings-daemon to crash. So I removed it again and did logout/login, and now it seems closing the same number of okular windows does not crash gnome-settings-daemon.