Very similar problem. Feisty with all updates applied as of 16 March 2007. The music collection is 11,000 MP3s, 80Gb on a Samba share on a Linksys Slug. Rhythmbox hangs during startup when the collection check reaches around either 2048 or 4096 songs. Kill it, Delete the XML files and it then starts fine. Run the scan and it completes. Close down and restart rhythmbox and it again hangs at around the same place. Under Edgy, Rhythmbox managed fine, scanning the same library and restarting fine after the library has been scanned.
On Edgy I had perhaps similar problems with Amarok refusing to fully scan the whole library. Under Feisty this seems to be cured but now Rhythmbox has caught the cold. I wonder if this is all related to libtag (or is it taglib). -- Rhythmbox hang during launch https://launchpad.net/bugs/71208 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs