Comment 18 for bug 729827

The problem is that all of the 'assistive technology' stuff like at-spi2-registryd and at-spi-core(?) cannot be removed properly, despite being disabled, without pulling out a whole load of programs. This is problematic (upstream gnome induced) and the best way i've found is to stop it from running with:

sudo mv /usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi2-registryd /usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi2-registryd.old

and

sudo mv /usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi-bus-launcher /usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi-bus-launcher.old

here on 12.10.