Computer freezes when unmounting an external NTFS partition and MGSE media player extension is running

[Pitermann, Michel]

When I connect a Western Digital external hard disk to my computer, I can unmount it if the MGSE media player extension is off OR Banshee is not running. If I unmount the hard disk when Banshee is running WITH the media player extension set to on, the computer freezes with the music looping forever on a 1- or 2-second time window, and I have to hold the power button during 4 seconds to switch the computer off. I do not have any problems with non-NTFS partitions on other USB devices (FAT32, ext3, ext4 or several partitions of those types on an external device). That means that the 3 conditions have to be met to break Gnome Shell: (i) unmounting an external NTFS partition; (ii) MGSE media player extension ON; (iii) Banshee running. In this case the Gnome Shell systematically breaks.

The 300-GB external hard disk is formatted in one NTFS partition after an unmovable Western Digital one invisible to fdisk (end of fdisk -l):

     Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2048 623769599 311883776 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

 I am running Linux Mint 12 with full Gnome Shell on a fresh and rather standard installation (uname -a):

  Linux lilas 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:56:25 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

on a 8-thread Dell M4500 with 64-bit processors (part of cat /proc/cpuinfo):

processor : 7
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 30
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 840 @ 1.87GHz