[ILUG] Environment for Gnome desktop apps?

[Lars Hecking]

 RedHat 6.2/Gnome.

 How to I set the environment for apps launched from the Gnome desktop?

 A user here has configured her desktop to launch xfig via a button/icon
 at the bottom of the screen, but then xfig cannot export any files because
 it doesn't find fig2dev. The latter lives in /usr/X11R6/bin, which is in
 her $path (xfig works properly if started from a shell).