GNOME Appearance Properties pegs CPU

After experimenting with Openbox for a while, I got frustrated and returned to GNOME. However, I discovered that every time I ran gnome-appearance-properties, it would use 100% of the CPU time—and, to make matters worse, the process would fail to terminate after I closed the window. I also noticed I couldn't change my theme to anything besides Clearlooks.

I did some Googling and came up with a solution.

1. Remove GTK-Qt Theme Engine and GTK Theme Switch. If you're using GNOME, you probably don't need these packages.
   

   sudo apt-get autoremove gtk-qt-engine gtk-theme-switch

2. Get rid of your gtkrc-2.0 file. You could rename it or just blow it away, depending on how confident you are that you won't need it again.
   

   mv ~/.gtkrc-2.0 ~/.gtkrc-2.0.bad