Comment 14 for bug 384062

I ran into a similar issue, but found an alternate fix.

If I opened my home directory in file browser, evince-thumbnailer would hit 100%, and stay that way. Additionally, no thumbnails would show up in the window.

To make a long story short, I'd run some commands as root in my home directory. As a result, a few files were owned by root, with permissions that didn't give my account access.

Once I chown'd everything in my home directory to be owned by myself, the problem went away.

Personally, I think that evince-thumbnailer should deal with EPERM errors properly, but as usual YMMV.