Metacity not loading

[Frank Jahnke]

Metacity no longer loads for me as a regular user who is a member of the
wheel group.  It does for root.  Any ideas what might be causing this?

It started about three or four weeks ago when I was playing with wine.
Thereafter, in retrospect, metacity has not loaded.  In the mean while I
have updated to xorg 7.3 and Gnome 2.20, thinking erroneously that one
of these may have been the cause.  I am on 6.2-R-p7 with the nVidia
driver 1.0.9639.

Metacity itself has the correct permissions.  Loading it from a terminal
window (as a non-root user) once Gnome has loaded corrects the various
and sundry issues as you would expect.  I start gnome using "startx" and
not gdm; .xinitrc simply contains "exec gnome-session."  The expected
services are started in rc.conf.

Any guidance would be most appreciated.

Frank