[xmonad] Fresh install on ubuntu, no windows appearing

[Brian Victor]

I'll open by saying this is not the FAQ. I'm pressing mod-shift-enter;
that's not the problem.

I installed Ubuntu 10.10 under VirtualBox, using all defaults. Then I
did apt-get install xmonad, which pulled in xmonad 0.9.1.

At this point I tried a few approaches to switch to xmonad, based on
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/index.php?title=Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Gnome

For the simplest approach, I killed metacity then ran xmonad. Upon
running xmonad, all my windows disappeared. I pressed mod-shift-enter a
few times; no terminals appeared. I killed xmonad and started metacity
again. The original windows reappeared along with the terminal windows I
created while xmonad was running. They were in a layout that could only
have been created by xmonad. So it's clearly doing something, but I
can't see what while it's running.

/usr/share/applications/xmonad.desktop and
/usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop both exist. I've tried the various
gconftool commands on the above page, admittedly in a somewhat
cargo-cult manner. When I feel like I've strayed too much from the
pristine config, I recreate the user settings.

Any ideas on fixing this?

-- 
Brian