[xmonad] gnome theming is destroying my life

[Michael Norrish]

I probably updated my Ubuntu 12.04 install too enthusiastically, and suddenly I 
have a lot of horrible theming.  In particular, menu bars are now a horrible 
grey colour, and my hand cursor is black with a white outline.  Thunderbird has 
been particularly badly affected: there the menu bar has a dark grey background 
and black for the text colour.

My gnome-relevant set up is

    `/usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop`

            [Desktop Entry]
            Encoding=UTF-8
            Name=XMonad
            Comment=Lightweight tiling window manager
            Exec=gnome-session --session=xmonad
            Icon=xmonad.png
            Type=XSession

    `/usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/xmonad.session`

            [GNOME Session]
            Name=Xmonad session
            RequiredComponents=gnome-settings-daemon;gnome-panel;
            RequiredProviders=windowmanager;notifications;
            DefaultProvider-windowmanager=xmonad
            DefaultProvider-notifications=notification-daemon

Until a few days ago, this was giving me a very pleasant xmonad experience with 
a little gnome seasoning.

But, it also seems as if I can't adjust my gnome settings.

There's an Applications / System Tools / System Settings menu entry that hangs 
off the gnome-panel, and this allows the selection of themes from the Display 
option, but this doesn't seem to have any effect on what I see.

I realise that this is more a Gnome question than an xmonad one, but my 
situation is more likely to be one that xmonad users understand and/or have 
encountered.   I'd like to keep the gnome "seasoning" around if possible, but 
the way it looks at the moment is sooo ugly.

Any advice gratefully received,
Michael