Comment 6 for bug 398734

Dave, where is your music located, on a local disk or some sort of USB disc/music player?

I also see this behaviour when I open rhythmbox and I have not mounted the network storage that the music is on, as Sebastian already mentioned. You say it sometimes doesn't do this, what is different between the times it does this and those times it doesn't, specifically, do you have any external drives/music players attached?