I've been stumbling over this today, and for me the problematic settings was if I had the gconf key /apps/osso/hildon-desktop/desktop_orientation_lock true so in order to achieve the same lock whilst not killing my dialer I used gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/hildon-desktop/desktop_orientation_lock -t bool false gconftool-2 -s /apps/osso/hildon-desktop/ui_can_rotate -t bool false