Comment 26 for bug 164120

I also have the same problem, folks, Ubuntu Hardy, fully upgraded. When I don't have the NFS in my network, because I move away from that network, then, when I start Gnome, it hangs very quickly.

I have manually deleted NFS directory (which is mounted with autofs) from .gtk-bookmarks, everything goes fine now. If I try to examine that directory from Nautilus, I have to wait, but I'm able to stop it.

I have observed that the problem is that things occur at the background, with no other choice for the user but to wait until autofs tells the user that it is impossible to mount the NFS volume. This thing, apparently, never happens. And so, this task should just be threaded at the background, thus allowing Gnome-mounter (or the application which accesses that directory) continue with the job without interrupting all the system.

It's definitely not a flaw in NFS, since it is not possible to tell that the server is down, except if you wait for a long amount of time, which is not acceptable in this case. The only solution is to do this task asynchronously from within Gnome itself, as KDE obviously does.

Maybe some versions of NFS and autofs wait for a bit shorter doing this task, but this may be wrong in other situations, and anyways, you still have to wait that period of time, which is clearly not the correct thing.