How come I always get
"GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)"
when I start 'gedit' from a shell from my superuser account?
The technical answer is that gedit is a Gtk+/Gnome program, and expects to find a current gconf session for its configuration. But running it as a separate user who isn't logged in on the desktop, you don't find it. So it spits out a warning, telling you. The failure should be benign though, and the editor will still run.
The real answer is: don't do that. You don't want to be running GUI apps as anything but the logged-in user, in general. And you never want to be running any GUI app as root, ever.