Comment 9 for bug 1020512

These are directories containing sockets that at-spi2-atk and libatspi use for direct D-Bus connections. The sockets used to be placed in /tmp/at-spi2. This was changed in 2.5.3 so that they now live in XDG_RUNTIME_DIR (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678348). I've randomized the directory name at the request of a couple people who reviewed my original patch, and now a separate directory is created for each application, and part of the issue is that gtk+ does not currently call the clean-up code in atk-bridge, so nothing removes the sockets and directories.

I've just committed a change to at-spi2-atk (6fbb1b) to make it lazily create the directory and socket (ie, only when an AT actually requests the socket's address), so it should no longer create directories if no AT is listening. The change will be included in 2.5.4 (I'll release on the 16th). Note that this does not actually fix the problem--it only hides it from users who do not make use of AT-SPI.