My problem: docky won't load until AFTER fusion is loaded and initialized.

Here is how I load things upon gnome login:

Using System->Preferences->Personal->Sessions: I have it start ~/bin/autostart.sh. I did this because there were a few programs that I wanted to load AFTER fusion, and there was no way I could find to set the loading order using the "Sessions" application.

So, I start fusion (by launching "fusion icon"), wait an arbitrary amount of time, and then load the two things that I want to load only after fusion is loaded and ready to rock-and-roll. This works 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time gnome-do loads before fusion is ready and I have to toggle the docky skin off and then back on to get docky working. If I increase the sleep time, it works 100% of the time -- but that bugs me because most of the time it is ready in 8-12 seconds.

I all seems too hackalicious to me to control this with "sleep". I've spent a reasonable amount of time with Google looking for a way to test if a composite window manager is running, and I can't find it. Can someone either point me towards an existing program I can use to test if fusion is running (and ready) -- or point me in the direction of an API I can use to write a (hopefully 10-line) "are there composite extensions ready to use?" program?

It looks like I solved it for myself. Funny how that happens -- I'll spend a bunch of time on my own trying to solve something before posting a question here, and then I often end up solving the problem for myself within a few hours of my fedoraforum post.

I switched fusion off, recorded the output of xvinfo glxinfo and xprop. I then set it back on, and ran the same 3 commands. I compared the output of each -- and voila!! I noticed a difference in the xprop outputs that looked promising. The following line was there when fusion was running, and missing when fusion wasn't running:

... and it seems to work. I've not tried this on a cold boot (when fusion startup takes the longest), but the test code (dumping the output of `date` to a file in /tmp) shows me it takes 2-3 seconds before proceeding, and docky has worked each time after I tried this.

The good news: That nailed it -- the problem is solved for me. On a cold boot (while it was loading gnome for the first time -- and a bajillion other things for sure) it waited 31 seconds between launching fusion-icon and moving on with the dependencies.

The bad news: I have no idea WHY my environment has that difference in the xprop output. I assume that this is related to the "video playback" check-box in ccsm (CompizConfigSettingsManager), but as everything is working for me at this point I am going to pay attention to my family who is here for Easter dinner instead of tinkering. If you don't have "COMPIZ_VIDEO" in your xprop output, I don't know how to tell you to get it there.