Comment 6 for bug 224071

It could be the 'noatime' attribute. I've relatime and it works fine. I've reproduced the problem and update notifier only shows the popup after it being written.

(Before)
$ ls -latr /var/crash/
total 31460
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 2009-07-01 20:14 ..
-rw------- 1 kmos kmos 406999 2009-09-08 22:48 _usr_bin_update-notifier.1000.crash
-rw------- 1 kmos kmos 610551 2009-09-11 23:35 _bin_bash.1000.crash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2009-09-13 09:50 .lock
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 2009-09-13 09:50 .
---------- 1 kmos kmos 31176366 2009-09-13 09:51 _usr_lib_firefox-3.5.3_firefox.1000.crash

(After)
$ ls -latr /var/crash/
total 32804
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 2009-07-01 20:14 ..
-rw------- 1 kmos kmos 406999 2009-09-08 22:48 _usr_bin_update-notifier.1000.crash
-rw------- 1 kmos kmos 610551 2009-09-11 23:35 _bin_bash.1000.crash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2009-09-13 09:50 .lock
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 2009-09-13 09:50 .
-rw------- 1 kmos kmos 32550943 2009-09-13 09:51 _usr_lib_firefox-3.5.3_firefox.1000.crash