window manager or GTK themes sporatically messed up

[cheshirekow]

For some reason every once in a while when I login there's something really screwy about the display. All the icons are messed up and there are these thick ugly borders around everything inside the window. The outer window decorations look fine though. I attached two screenshots. One when it's normal, and one when it's messed up. Evidently the sounds are changed too. There must be something wrong with "themes" somewhere. If I go to system->preferences->appearance and change stuff, the window decorations change but nothing inside the window does.

The problem fixes itself after a few restarts though.

Any ideas?

Note that some areas of the gnome-panel in the screenshot are see-through, but that is not what appears on my desktop... it is in fact opaque.

[cheshirekow]

Bump. Surely someone can at least tell me the name of the program that handles these things. Is it gdm? is the gtk-theme-manager? is it something else? where are the logs for these things?