While doing an 'emerge -u gnome' on my laptop, I got a sandbox violation for gnome-vfs-2.0.1. mkdir: /root/.gconfd I tried adding 'addpredict "${HOME}/.gconfd"' to gnome2.eclass as per Azarah, but it was a no go.
i had the same prob just do mkdir /root/.gconfd
solved in recent revisions of gconf