Comment 24 for bug 293482

Here, what I noticed is that the GTK2 behavior has changed, WRT how global themes are treated. Previously, whatever was defined in /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc acted as a global fallback theme to use. Recently, the behavior seems to have changed to make it a hard override for the user themes defined via gconf, which effectively prevents the user form selecting the theme of their choice via the GNOME Appearance preferences. If the content of that global gtkrc is commented out or the file renamed to e.g. gtkrc.bak, then the user can choose their favorite theme again.