linuxgeek: [LINUX_Newbies] Have any of you folks had problems with metacity in gnome?

Greetings!

When my hard drive ate itself the other day, I installed my backup
drive in the laptop. I had a live "CD" image on a USB key of the
Uberstudent version of Ubuntu Karmic on hand, so I installed that on
the drive.

Since the next version of KDE is soon to come out, I thought I'd run
Gnome for a couple weeks as my primary desktop for a change. So far,
so good...until it suddenly doesn't save the session properly.

Thus, each time I start up I have to open a terminal and start
metacity again. The error message says there is no file in my home
directory at ~/.config/metacity/XXXXXX (the latter a long string of
letters supposedly from an auto-saved session file).

There is a .config directory, and there is a metacity
subdirectory--it's just not saving the session for some reason.

Since I have only run gnome for a few hours at a time over the years,
this has me somewhat baffled at the moment.

Have any of you gentlemen run into this, and if so, how have you fixed
it? I understand it is not uncommon, but the discussions I have found
thus far speak of renaming the .gnome2 directory to let the system
rebuild it--which I have done, to no avail.

Thanks for any suggestions.

David