gentoo-1.4 gnome-settings-daemon stopped segfaulting as I finally had gedit installed. the only gnome2 packages not installed are gnome2-user-docs, gnome-games- bug-budy experienced this on two installs of gentoo-1.4 (the athlon-stage3 that was available yesterday ...)
well.. I'm not sure what to do about this really... please file this upstream with <a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/http://bugzilla.gnome.org/</a> as it appears to relate to them more than here.