Comment 30 for bug 379183

I finally fixed this problem for myself, hopefully my experience will help others.

I've had the multi-window spawning problem with nautilus in the past (on this host/instance of ubuntu 10.04) but fixed it. And now, late last night I had this problem start up seemingly out of the blue.

     $ nautilus -q
(nautilus:28778): Unique-DBus-WARNING **: Error while sending message: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

As with you guys I had no desktop and no ability to browse with nautilus, and the 'places' menu worked but would not initiate a nautilus browsing session when selecting 'Home Folder' (obviously). Only way to use nautilus for browsing was
     $ sudo nautilus (dont' do this!--use thunar or dolphin or something)

CPU use was running very high and I tried everything I could think of and read every post I could find. What finally ticked in my mind where the references to 'thumbnail-generation' on this thread and it dawned on me that I had used "ubuntu-tweak" to clear my thumbnail cache very near to the time that nautilus started going haywire. So I re-launched "ubuntu-tweak" and cleared my thumbnail cache once more. The results were instantaneous. Nautilus is working fine and my desktop is restored.

Things I tried that didn't work include:
     1. 'ps aux |grep nautilus' & then 'kill -KILL pid' (resulted in instant respawn with new pid)
     2. removing all files from ~/Desktop
     3. clear contents of /home/user/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
     4. reinstall gnome-session, nautilus, ubuntu-desktop, etc.
     5. sudo umount -a -t nfs

I haven't restarted the machine yet but am confident my fix will be persistent. Somewhere in the back of my cobweb filled mind is a notion that my previous multi-spawning nautilus issue on this machine was related to nautilus thumbnail cache also, but it's been a while so don't quote me on that.

While trying to find a solution it was very helpful to run
     $ ps aux |grep nautilus (observe the pid of nautilus)
     $ kill -STOP pid (enter the pid from above command)
This causes nautilus to sleep and stop maxing out the CPU.

     $ uname -a
        Linux hostname 2.6.32-47-generic #109-Ubuntu SMP Tue May 7 02:02:22 UTC 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux
     $ cat /etc/*release
        DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
        DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04
        DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid
        DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS"

P.S. Post #29 was very condescending and immediately unhelpful. Sober up DrunkSOB, and don't be such a dork.