OB very slow to open over GNOME

[Holly Bostick]

Hi,

After some effort, I was able to create a custom GNOME 2.10 session that
replaces Metacity with OB (and doesn't start Nautilus so that desktop
clickthroughs display the OB menu). I even gave it its own GDM *.desktop
file, so I can log into "regular" GNOME if I break something and need to
fix it.

Fine, except when I log into my custom session, the splash screen shows

Sesson Manager (or something like; my desktop is in Dutch)
openbox

and then it "hangs". Feh has loaded the desktop bg, and OB is started (I
can get to the menu), but the desktop does not finish loading (no
panel)-- until I click on the desktop, open the OB menu and choose
something (I usually choose "Run", which starts gmrun; I don't know if
choosing another entry would also work, but I expect so). As soon as
gmrun opens, the panel loads and I can go on with my day. Logging out is
also very slow; I only did it once, but it looks like the logout doesn't
proceed until I close some open application. Anyway it took 5 minutes
before I got back to GDM, whatever I did (nothing had disappeared from
the desktop, but the panel was not accessible, so I was apparently
logging out, veeeeery slowly).

The only thing I can think of that might be causing this is the openbox
--replace now in the current session listing (run and saved as per the
docs), because metacity is no longer being loaded by the session,
there's actually nothing to --replace ...?

All the other entries in my current session seem normal;

50 -- 	    app   gnome-session-properties
00 restart  app	  gnome-smproxy --sm-config-prefix /.blah
20 restart  app   openbox --replace
40 restart  app   gnome-panel --sm-config-prefix /.blah
50 restart  app   mail-notification
50 --       app   thunderbird-bin (running to write this mail)
25 settings help  feh --bg-scale /background/file.png

No programs in "Startup Programs" at all.

Can anyone help me figure out what the problem is? I've been using OB
for a while, but I usually use it alone. This is the first time I've
tried running it over GNOME, but I'd like to keep doing that, since a
lot of GNOME programs really prefer that the GNOME backend be fully
initialized.

Thanks in advance,
Holly