Comment 33 for bug 1003185

I had this problem also. As it turns out, I had downloaded some files into the $HOME/Downloads directory of a normal user as root, so those files were owned by root. I'm guessing that shutter barfed while trying to read the contents of the directory. chowning the directory and its contents back to the normal user allowed shutter to start without the error.

Prior to this I had tried removing the ~/.shutter directory, but the error persisted after doing so.