Comment 11 for bug 53388

A couple observations:

1) When du can't find a directory, going into that directory and executing a du or an ls causes subsequent invocations of du to find that directory
2) ls -l seems pretty normal

evidence:
cindy:/windows$ du --max-depth=1
19456 ./backup
.
.
1120 ./car
du: `./Media': No such file or directory
du: `./ext2fs': No such file or directory
.
.

cindy:/windows$ cd Media/
cindy:/windows/Media$ du --max-depth=1
32 ./Music
64 .
cindy:/windows/Media$ cd ..
cindy:/windows$ du --max-depth=1
19456 ./backup
.
.
1120 ./car
64 ./Media
du: `./ext2fs': No such file or directory
cindy:/windows$ ls -ld ext2fs
drwxrwx--- 2 root plugdev 32768 2004-05-29 13:33 ext2fs/
cindy:/windows$ cd ext2fs/
cindy:/windows/ext2fs$ ls -l
total 928
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 6724 2002-04-20 19:24 changes.txt*
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 17984 1998-06-19 19:29 copying.txt*
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 25956 1999-07-22 00:45 diskio2.dll*
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 527 2006-03-31 14:35 explore2fs debug log.txt*
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 780800 2002-10-20 16:56 explore2fs.exe*
-rwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 6263 2000-07-11 23:24 readme.txt*

Now that we've "looked" at ext2fs, du finds it:
cindy:/windows$ du --max-depth=1
19456 ./backup
.
.
1120 ./car
64 ./Media
960 ./ext2fs

The machine is running edgy. The partition is vfat, mounted without utf-8:
cindy:/windows$ mount |grep windows
/dev/hda1 on /windows type vfat (rw,umask=007,gid=46)