Bug in gnome-terminal for Ubuntu 9.04

Slowly but surely I'm starting to stumble with certain bugs in Ubuntu that I did not encounter in Fedora. I usually run my remote sessions from OS X. Before I would connect to my Fedora box and launch gnome-terminal while running a X11 session locally and take it from there. But now that I run Ubuntu when I tried to launch gnome-terminal I get the following error:

Failed to contact the GConf daemon; exiting.

Uh? Of course gnome-terminal works locally but how is it that remotely it blocks me? Needing to get some stuff done I opted to use gnome-terminal counterpart: konsole. The program konsole launches fine and works just right from OS X. Needless to say, my search in the Ubuntu forums talk about gconfd not running, which is running in my system. Like always I need to poke around the find the work around. Or just leave gnome-terminal alone for a while until the bug gets taken care in next update. Maybe if I have a GUI session running locally? Beats me.