It is the correct thread, it's just that I spent the ln the cold planes of Tatarstan, so in the short period I had to browse this forum I missed this thread.

As you have been told, setting the key /apps/osso/hildon-desktop/key-actions/dbus_ctrl_shortcuts to false disables capturing of ctrl-space. But should default to false. Are you sure you did not set it to true?

Your gconftool-2 error seems to be like there is some hidden character. This might happen if you type a 2 byte char (a Cyrillic letter) and then delete it. Please try to retype the command. Remember also that this key is only read once when hildon-desktop starts, so for this change to take effect you need to restart hildon-desktop, by running killall hildon-desktop, or rebooting.

If you want to return to standard hildon-desktop you certainly don't need to reflash the device.
You can reinstall the hildon-desktop package. Download it from here: http://repository.maemo.org/pool/fre...+0m5_armel.deb
And install it with dpkg -i .