About every 3 days on my desktop (always on), X crashes, gdm restarts and it dumps me at a login screen. When I log in Gnome appears to have lost a lot of its settings: it plays sounds in weird places, UI elements look like they're from the 90s (GTK+ defaults) and it's generally pretty hideous.

Note everything works fine. It's not like my profile doesn't exist because I can browse the internet fine (Firefox knows my bookmarks, history, passwords, etc) and my desktop is unscathed (apart from the icon theme).

Manually restarting gdm doesn't fix this. I have to do a full reboot.

Now I'm almost certain that this is a nvidia issue causing X to baulk (I've seen similarish threads on nvnews) and I'm happy with that (my fault for running their latest drivers all the time). What I'm concerned about is why Gnome looks so fugly. Is there anything I can do to force it to reload its settings without restarting the whole computer.

Restarting is an issue for me as I run several daemons that other computers on the network depend upon.

This is what I mean by ugly/fugly... Look at that scroll bar!