Trouble with NFS $HOME and Gnome 3

I've been having problems with Gnome 3 systems freezing when I log in as the same user from multiple machines. I have NFS home directories that are shared across machines, in what used to be (back in my day) a very standard configuration. I've seen a number of freezes recently, and I think I may have tracked this down.  It looks like the gconf configuration on Debian is broken by default, apparently because gconf itself is sufficiently broken that they decided it would be better to put lock files in /tmp by default.

The procedure to "fix" this is apparently (according to /usr/share/doc/gconf2/FAQ.txt.gz):

1. Define the GCONF_GLOBAL_LOCKS environment variable (for instance in /etc/profile.d/).
2. Create an /etc/orbitrc file containing:

ORBIIOPIPv4=1
ORBIIOPIPv6=1

Supposedly maybe after this gnome will not freeze randomly and permanently.  That sounds nice.  It's a little disturbing that this is disabled by default for security reasons, but being unable to use one's computer (or forced to log out of one computer in order to use a different one) isn't a great option.