Comment 169 for bug 128803

Could someone try this for me:

open a console and do killall nautilus.

If it works (like it does for me), the whole desktop will freeze for roughly the same time as when starting up.

I'm pretty sure that this is a nautilus issue, as my system freezes right before nautilus comes up (no desktop icons), and when it unfreezes, I get them back. I've hacked a workaround for this bug by using the readahead trick here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565651

With this in place, it's not too bad. But there's a pause before GDM comes up now (I'd imagine that readahead is that chugging away here...). After that pause, everything's pretty snappy though.