There used to be some messed up packages of pymaemo around. I'm not surprised of so many trouble with gconf even today.
I guess the only "portable" way to use gconf with pymaemo is by working around this issue with the gconftool-2 command line tool and calling this in your code (see my earlier post in this thread).

I just implemented some gconf stuff for the flipclock app that Ciroip and I have been working on using your suggested work around and found that it's by far the easiest and most reliable way of getting things up and running for users. Yea, I'm sure it's possible if you really hack it out to get the normal gconf module to work properly, but most users generally don't want to put up with those hassles, they just want it to work.