Comment 47 for bug 290136

The problem lies in Nautilus, which, only being "prepared to be launched latter" (its name appears somewhere in script or so) in this early stage of starting GNOME desktop, silenty fails to start when is actually called latter with no location given (and _only_ with no location given).

This may look really mad at first sight, but I experience the same behavior before when I tried to put Nautilus as an item to the Openbox's menu. Nautilus failed to launch itselfs from the menu latter in session, only the cursor has been looking very busy for a while - which take the same ammount of time like in this case with GNOME Do's plugin.

You can easily reproduce this by replacing "exec=gnome-do" in /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-do.desktop with e.g. "exec=nautilus /home", restart Your session, see happy Nautilus window, change the line to "exec=nautilus" only and relog again with no window beeing opened at all. $HOME variable is iniciated at this time.