Can't update preferences and can't get rid of Welcome dialog in Gnucash 2.4.7 (OS X 2.6.8)

[prl]

On 3/08/11 2:09, John Ralls wrote:
> Sorry, I misunderstood that [creation of ~/.gconf] from your original.
No problem
> None of my ideas for replicating the problem are working; No matter what I do, GConf creates its keys in ~/.gconf.
> You could try running Gnucash from Terminal. Maybe some extra error messages will show up. (Make sure you have a big enough scrollback buffer or redirect the error stream so that you don't lose the top of the output.)
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
Running Gnucash from Terminal surprisingly doesn't give a large number 
of error messages:

Cambyses:~ prl$ /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash
No GDK Window
No NSWindow
Cambyses:~ prl$

And Gnucash otherwise runs the same as when I run it from the Finder.

However if I run /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash-bin 
instead, it does give a popup window that says: "An error occurred while 
loading or saving configuration information for Gnucash-bin. ..." (Why 
do GUI designers always seem to make error popup text non 
selectable/copyable?) and it offers in another popup to fix the problem: 
"The configuration data used to specify default values for GnuCash 
cannot be found in the default system locations". However, I'm not sure 
whether these are symptoms of my problem or are simply happening because 
Gnucash-bin isn't being run with suitable environment variables, 
suitable arguments or other support processes (like gconfd).

When run this way I do get an error message when I tell the popup that's 
offering to fix the problem to simply quit:

Cambyses:~ prl$ /Applications/Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS/Gnucash-bin

(Gnucash-bin:966): qof-CRITICAL **: qof_object_shutdown: assertion 
`object_is_initialized == TRUE' failed
Cambyses:~ prl$

Regards,
Peter