What happened to AWN in Ubuntu Lucid?

I've been running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (Alpha 2) on my EeePC 901 for a few weeks now without any problems whatsoever.
As the OS is in alpha, I make sure I do an update every day.
Well, after I did my update last Monday and rebooted, no AWN appeared.
Funny though because ps -ax showed AWN was running. So why didn't it show up?
Then I cam across this lengthy thread that recognized the problem but was unable to assign the blame to either Gconf or to AWN itself.
Then Wednesday after I updated, which updated contained a lot of Gconf stuff, AWN came back having done nothing other than update.
Seems it was a Gconf problem after all.