Ok, I messed up. I installed ubuntu 11.10, installed awesome wm and removed unity, to have something to fall back on, I also installed gnome-session-fallback.

I was messing around and did the following, because the awesome wiki told me to:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop False
# Still disable the buggy Nautilus desktop thing
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager awesome
# sets awesome as wm

Now here's what's wrong: I can start up decently, and then I get into a login window (that of gnome-session-fallback). I enter my username, select the preferred window manager (awesome in my case) and enter my password. It accepts these, but then hold for a second and just opens the login window again, in effect preventing me from actually logging in.

I also tried gconftool-2 --unset (from the tty) on these settings, but that didn't work either.

What can I do to revert the gconftool-2 settings to something that should work? I tried apt-get purging gnome-session-fallback and lightdm, and then installing them again, but that didn't work.