I've never messed with gnome but I had this happen with xsm first time
I installed NetBSD. I'm not sure whether it was a missing /etc/hosts
entry or because my host entry was 127.0.0.1, which also happens to give
a file exists warning at boot or something like that due to
route add $addr 127.0.0.1
in /etc/netstart.

Cheers,

	- Joel

> Has anyone else noticed that xsm dumps core without any preceeding error mess
> ages, if run with a non-existant hostname? By 'non-existant' I mean one that 
> isn't in /etc/hosts or resolvable by DNS (for instance a null hostname). This
>  carries over to gnome, which presumably reused some xsm code in their gnome-
> session session manager.
> 
> 	Yoav
> 
> PS: This is with XFree86 3.3.x (both NetBSD-1.3.3 and -current).
>