I can confirm that settings are reset upon *closing* my XFCE4 session normally. If I zap X with Ctrl+Alt+BkSpace and re-run XFCE4 then my session begins with the splash screen I selected.

Session option «Automatically save session state upon exiting» is *not* checked (I prefer chosing when I close my session) and «Ask when closing session» *is* checked. When I close my session the checkbox «Save current session state for further reuse» *is* checked. (Labels translated from French.)

I also confirm this is not occurring on XUbuntu amd64 platform. I've installed Xubuntu on my laptop (the same on which it didn't work under Gentoo) and my splash preference is kept.

Then you should report this to Ubuntu.  This is likely their bug.

And if doesn't work in every distribution, should I file a bug in all of them? Hey, I found that bug in Gentoo and confirmed it under Ubuntu; what more do you expect from me?

It' *not* a Ubuntu bug... Sorry.

The problem is NOT solved. Gentoo dev's require the bug to be declared upstream. So do Ubuntu dev's. So would you please mind how you checked this to be working for you? Did you download the Balou theme I mentioned and test it under Ubuntu and Gentoo?

To be honest, I won't reasonably download and try any distribution around. Maybe a few ones like Arch, Debian, Mepis but I won't report the bug to each of these.

Hope you understand.

I can confirm this in a custom compiled (aka from scratch) system using xfce4-session 4.4.3.

It appears that for some reason the ~/.config/xfce4-session/xfce4-session.rc gets overriden in two different cases.

1) When the splash screen setting is saved, the specified file gets completely overwritten.
2) On logout, the specified file gets completely overwritten.

for example, I have the following manually created file

xfce4-session.rc contents:
[Splash Screen]
Engine=simple

[General]
SessionName=Default
SaveOnExit=false


For case (1), when I change the screen saver the file then looks like the following:
[Splash Screen]
Engine=simple

or
[Splash Screen]
Engine=balou

For case (2), irregardless if case (1) happened or not, on logout it looks like:
[General]
SessionName=Default
SaveOnExit=false

This only started happening to me when I started to define the following environment variables:
    export USERDIR=~/
    export BASEDIR=${USERDIR}.config/xfce4/
    export XDG_DATA_DIRS=/share/
    export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config/
    export XDG_CONFIG_CACHE=~/.local/
    export XDG_CACHE_HOME=~/.cache/
    export ICEAUTHORITY=~/.ICEauthority

    xinitrc=~/.xinitrc

I have _not_ yet confirmed that this is the actual cause nor confirmed which one of these is causing (or combination thereof).

I will report any results when I get them.

I managed to confirm that the symptom is caused by defining:
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config/

(In reply to comment #7)
> I managed to confirm that the symptom is caused by defining:
> export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=~/.config/

So it suffices to set XDG_CONFIG_HOME, be it to the default value or anything else to trigger the bug?

Indeed I set XDG_CONFIG_HOME (~/.xfce4/config/) and XDG_CACHE_HOME (~/.xfce4/cache). However the bug also appears to happen on Ubuntu livecd -- note I haven't checked that these variables are set or not.

Strangely enough, the problem is gone although I'm still using custom directories for XFCE config and cache:

XDG_CACHE_HOME=/home/vinz/.xfce4/cache
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/vinz/.xfce4/config/
XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/usr/share

It's been three/four days I've set Balou and the custom splash I mentioned in my first post. It comes now as expected each time I logon.

A couple of XFCE packages have been updated since I reported the bug: xfce-base/xfce4-session-4.4.3. It's only a couple of days ago that I tried Balou splash again -- out of curiosity. Now it works.

Do you want me to close as WORKSFORME?

I recently switched to XFCE 4.6.
This problem does not seem to be present in 4.6.

Comment 11 Benedikt Meurer 2009-11-07 10:31:13 CET

Mass reassign. Nick, please check these pending reports. Thx.

Comment 12 Nick Schermer 2010-02-07 13:31:09 CET

Looks to be fixed after the switch to xfconf.