emacs not finding Xdefaults

[rustom]

I have a .Xdefaults file containing things like

emacs-snapshot-gtk*Background: Wheat
emacs-snapshot-gtk*font: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-
m-70-iso8859-1

I also have emacs-snapshot-gtk in my startup programs in gnome.

Strangely when X starts it does not use these settings but if I start
emacs-snapshot-gtk from the shell it finds them.

The last time this happened when I ran xrdb < .Xdefaults the problem
got corrected. This time no such luck.

The only clue of what brought this on is that I edited .bashrc and
introduced a syntax error.
Even after removing it however the error is still there.

System: debian etch