Comment 6 for bug 86281

This issue seems to have persisted, see duplicate bug.

I also have this problem, trying to add missing information:

Using
$ pasuspender -- istanbul
changes the behavior:
without pasuspender: file input dialog pops up and then program terminates
with pasuspender: no file input dialog, no termination, but program hangs with the following output:

ps@peter:~$ pasuspender -- istanbul
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:37: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  self.tooltips = gtk.Tooltips()
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:77: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Use a selector to select area of screen to capture."))
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:90: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Select a window on the screen to capture"))
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:107: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Tick this if you want to screencast a 3d application. This will however take more CPU power."))
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:119: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Tick this if you want to record the mouse pointer during the screencast."))
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:133: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Tick this if you want to record audio with the screencast. You can choose the audio device to record from in the Multimedia Systems Selector in Preferences."))
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:145: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Select this if you do not want to scale down the size of the recording."))
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:169: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Select this to scale down the recording resolution by 1/2."))
/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/istanbul/main/tray_popup.py:176: DeprecationWarning: Use the new widget gtk.Tooltip
  _("Select this to scale down the recording resolution by 1/4."))
DEBUG: final pipeline: oggmux name=mux ! filesink location=/tmp/tmpLcHwCA istximagesrc name=videosource display-name=:0.0 screen-num=0 show-pointer=false ! video/x-raw-rgb,framerate=10/1 ! videorate ! ffmpegcolorspace ! videoscale method=1 ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=1280,height=1024,framerate=10/1 ! theoraenc ! queue ! mux. gconfaudiosrc name=audiosource ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! queue ! mux.

strace on istanbul shows:
futex(0x9e770e8, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL

strace on pasuspender shows:
ppoll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN}, {fd=5, events=POLLIN}], 3, NULL, NULL, 8