Comment 15 for bug 250021

as Michael Coupet states when this bug occurs you cannot regain control by killing the root nautilus , infact you cannot kill it because the system is completly unresponsive and only a hard reset or sysreq rseiub will reboot the system and the reboot will not start gdm but leaves you at a terminal login . investigation shows that the permissions for / have ben changed to 700 (root access only) . logging in to the terminal as root if you have a root password set and running chmod 755 / (rwx for root r x for user and others) restores the system to normal .