This is pretty nice. Though I have some minor niggles with the style -- use of global filehandles versus lexical, and single-arg system() -- it's all pretty much how I'd do something along these lines.

Also, I like the use of gconftool-2. I didn't know about this little program, and it seems very useful (even if GConf reminds me way too much of the Windows Registry). Thanks for the example. :)