Desktop intermittently black after login

[TonyGould]

On hardy I have this intermittent problem on my laptop. It seems to happen anywhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of the logins, but is getting more frequent if anything. The desktop is black, and I've lost all my desktop shortcuts. The login screen itself is fine. Everything else is fine, including the panels above & below the desktop. Starting up windows is fine. Compiz effects work well too. If Compiz is disabled, problem still happens but desktop is monochrome browny orange instead.

The following workarounds exist
- logging out and in
- "killall nautilus" in a terminal. After which the desktop comes back immediately, the mouse hangs and windows go grey for a few seconds, then my mouse comes back, and a File Browser window pops up in my home folder.
- Removing every file in ~/.nautilus on reboot, apart from my desktop shortcuts, 'file:%2F%2F%2Fhome%2Ftony%2FDesktop.xml'. (I've put a find ... | xargs rm command in my rc.local)

I spent many hours trying to figure out what was causing this, but it's a tedious process with all the reboots. My best guess when I discovered that the last workaround does the job with no ill effects, was that the file .nautilus/metafiles/x-nautilus-desktop is causing the problem. I have a bunch of Windows drives mounted, plus a USB drive plugged in (and I've noticed that linux distros sometimes object to having USB drives, and not just the one that's plugged into this machine), and I figure maybe Nautilus tries to mount one of these devices and hangs in the process. Sometimes you see CDs in this file as well. It seems to get recreated just fine if it's deleted, so I don't know what the point of it is, not that I'm any kind of expert.

This is not severe for me, but is something that IMHO wouldn't help someone coming to ubuntu for the first time.

rgds

Tony.

'lsb_release -rd'
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release: 8.04

PS I'm sorry I don't know about the internals of the ubuntu windowing system, so not sure which component this applies to.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.