I had my first crash of gnome-settings-daemon recently. I only noticed when iceweasel came back up (after its own crash) with ugly fonts and dumb (i.e. non-emacs) edit key bindings. I don't know how to get gnome-settings-daemon running again (is it enough just to run it on the command line? who can tell?) so I logged out and back in, losing my Emacs state. The whole experience felt very Windowsy.

Is "Windowsy" a word? I guess it is now. It means impotently infuriating, but with all kinds of bells and whistles thrown in, some of which actually work, just not the ones that matter.