GConf Error: No D-BUS daemon running?! How to reinstall or fix?

I had this same problem. In my system the problem is caused for ~/.dbus being owned by root. Changing ownership me solved the problem for me. I suggest you to check this on your system too.

Changing the ownership can be done with the chown command. For a single file:

chown <user>:<group> file

For a directory and its children:

chown -R <user>:<group> folder

So, in this case,

chown -R <your user>:<your group> ~/.dbus 

should work.

Try export $(dbus-launch)
This worked for me on Opensuse 12.1 while running it as a VM.

I also had a problem with dbus and vnc. So I added

eval `dbus-launch`

to ~/.vnx/xstartup. It starts gnome session for me!