Comment 1 for bug 1258443

I have a very similar problem to this although in my case Cinnamon restarts in normal mode, not fallback mode. The trigger mechanism is the same, changing the volume from the volume applet in the systray or the volume applet in Banshee.

As with the OP the error is triggered only after the first startup (or reboot) of Mint and not subsequently.

This appears in syslog for the time the error is triggered.

Jan 18 12:13:34 fujitsu cinnamon-session[1758]: WARNING: Application 'cinnamon.desktop' killed by signal 15