gnome-settings-daemon

[Juanito]

Is there a "standard" way to call the daemon (from ~/.X.d?) so that it connects with the x session, etc

[Arslan S.]

see this file for exec command:
/usr/local/etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.desktop
also you may need to update-gconf-database before running it
and make sure dbus daemon has restarted after loading extension

I don't know if gnome-settings-daemon can run outside gnome-session