Control-Alt-Del kills the running gnome session without prompting, or giving the user a chance to properly close down applications and connections. This is very irksome when running VMWare or other emulator that requires that key sequence. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Log in 2. Start X (if needed) 3. Press Control-Alt-Del Actual Results: X11 restarted. Expected Results: Best choice? Prompted with a "You really want to do this?" or somesuch.
For me (in 2.12) it does prompt for your Log Out, (save session, log out cancel) but if you really want to change it, Desktop -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. It's the default GNOME, and I don't really see any reason to change.