I finally fixed this problem for myself, hopefully my experience will help others.
I've had the multi-window spawning problem with nautilus in the past (on this host/instance of ubuntu 10.04) but fixed it. And now, late last night I had this problem start up seemingly out of the blue. $ nautilus -q (nautilus:28778): Unique-DBus-WARNING **: Error while sending message: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken. As with you guys I had no desktop and no ability to browse with nautilus, and the 'places' menu worked but would not initiate a nautilus browsing session when selecting 'Home Folder' (obviously). Only way to use nautilus for browsing was $ sudo nautilus (dont' do this!--use thunar or dolphin or something) CPU use was running very high and I tried everything I could think of and read every post I could find. What finally ticked in my mind where the references to 'thumbnail-generation' on this thread and it dawned on me that I had used "ubuntu-tweak" to clear my thumbnail cache very near to the time that nautilus started going haywire. So I re-launched "ubuntu-tweak" and cleared my thumbnail cache once more. The results were instantaneous. Nautilus is working fine and my desktop is restored. Things I tried that didn't work include: 1. 'ps aux |grep nautilus' & then 'kill -KILL pid' (resulted in instant respawn with new pid) 2. removing all files from ~/Desktop 3. clear contents of /home/user/.local/share/gvfs-metadata 4. reinstall gnome-session, nautilus, ubuntu-desktop, etc. 5. sudo umount -a -t nfs I haven't restarted the machine yet but am confident my fix will be persistent. Somewhere in the back of my cobweb filled mind is a notion that my previous multi-spawning nautilus issue on this machine was related to nautilus thumbnail cache also, but it's been a while so don't quote me on that. While trying to find a solution it was very helpful to run $ ps aux |grep nautilus (observe the pid of nautilus) $ kill -STOP pid (enter the pid from above command) This causes nautilus to sleep and stop maxing out the CPU. $ uname -a Linux hostname 2.6.32-47-generic #109-Ubuntu SMP Tue May 7 02:02:22 UTC 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ cat /etc/*release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS" P.S. Post #29 was very condescending and immediately unhelpful. Sober up DrunkSOB, and don't be such a dork. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to nautilus in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/379183 Title: nautilus Unique-DBus-WARNING To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/379183/+subscriptions -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs