Ever heard of Bonobo?

I haven't! Until today.

Having great "fun" with Solaris 10 still. Whilst trying to fix the keyboard settings (to change it from US to UK layout), I needed to enter the eeprom program. I was trying various options - and rebooting the machine several times - changing X/Gnome settings and restarting X doesn't seem to do a thing (BTW, I will post the fix for the keyboard later. I have it, but want to be sure it will work consistently!).

On one of the reboots the JDE (GNOME) desktop crashed on initialization, with "Bonobo activation server error, and "Nautilus can't be used now, due to an unexpected error" messages.

How frustrating! I have never heard of this Bonobo - what the heck is it? Somebody on the Sun forum said that if you cycle reboot several times, it eventually goes through (as if there was an attempt counter/timeout).

When it freezes with errors, you can still do CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to restart the xdm (GUI logging screen). That allows you to get a shell by doing the "Failsafe login".
I then did:
# ps -ef | grep bonobo
..... 481 1 bonobo-activation-server
# kill -9 481
got rid of the process and subsequent logins work well.

BTW, googling returned a manual page from:
http://maconlinux.net/linux-man-pages/en/bonobo-activation-server.1.html, where it states:
"This application tracks information about installed components and brokers components, in conjunction with it's client library; libbonobo-activation...
... Bonobo-activation-server, also ensur