Yesterday gnome decided to cease to work with me login as usual. There
were two different sets of beheaviour: either it took 5 min till I would
be logged in, or it just would crash the xserver. Other users with
gnome, and my user with xfce4 worked fine.

After trying for many hours to solve the problem I finally started to
rebuild my gnome setup from scratch.
I basically did a

rm .dconf*; rm .gnome*


started gdm again, and started to configure.

Lesson learned.

* It took only about 20 minutes to create my setup. Next time don't
be scarred to start from scratch
* Backups rock
* The gnome customs theme are not storred in the .dconf* or .gnome*
dirs.
* To disable eth1394 add it to /etc/modprobe.d/eth1394

What a waste of time