I fucked it up somehow when I was transferring old /home files to new /home (none of them was actually .dmrc), and tried the chmod that had worked way back when that was an Ubuntu issue and not a Lisa-broke-it issue, but to no avail. Renaming it, then later deleting it in an attempt to force it to recreate itself didn’t work, but I did get the message to stop. I don’t know whether it was one, two, three or four of these things, ’cause I got frustrated and did ’em all. 🙂

gedit .dmrc (then save and close)
sudo chmod 755 /home/lisa
sudo chmod 644 .dmrc
sudo chown lisa .dmrc

It didn’t auto-start aMSN on my next login, but that is probably because I hadn’t added aMSN to the start session at the time I fuXX0red .dmrc, so the last session preferences it could save had just conky and my auto-start screenlets. We’ll see on the next login; now that the permissions are correct and I’m not getting the error anymore, it should be able to save changes to the default session. Time will tell, but right now, I’ve got stuff to get done so I can go and watch Mythbusters (better be a new episode, too, and not some fucking re-run).