OK, so I figured if I shut down my X session entirely, I could let emerge upgrade Gnome to 2.6 and start up a new session afterwards and everything would work fine. I even checked to make sure gconfd and friends were gone, as they have a habit of sticking around after a session ends.

Turns out that's not good enough. Apparently, during the upgrade process, some test suite started up the Bonobo activation server, and when I started my first Gnome 2.6 session there was much weird behavior, like gnome-settings-daemon failing to start.

Probably the best way to make sure everything's reset is to reboot the system entirely, but damn, that feels waaaaay too un-Unixy.

In related news, Gnome 2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.4, although that annoying dialog box in Epiphany asking whether to open or save the playlists from Shoutcast is fixed.