rauschd:

Have you verified that the problem really has nothing to do with 'rapier', but (probably) your installed python environment?

This is what I just did to prove both the version of python being used, and that 'gconf' was nicely available:

Nokia-N800-23-14:~# python
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Sep 8 2008, 19:47:42)
[GCC 3.4.4 (release) (CodeSourcery ARM 2005q3-2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from gnome import gconf
>>>

Notice there are no error messages. Maybe you should re-flash and re-install python stuff? I am no expert, but it doesn't sound like this is a 'rapier' issue (?).