It seems dbus is not working properly using failsafe session. I suggest you to enable it (/etc/init.d/dbus restart) and then launching Firefox or any other application which causes a session shutdown.
-- Gnome 2.16 crashes after loading some apps https://launchpad.net/bugs/65971 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
