Comment 69 for bug 870326

I'm hitting this exact same issue. I initially noticed this in software center, when clicking 'install' there was no progress, it returned immediately.

I then tried to backup the ~/.thunderbird directory and got permission errors, noticed that some files were owned by root. I chowned them and then got INPUT/OUTPUT errors.

The funny thing is, if I login to my gnome-shell or gnome-fallback sessions everything works perfectly. I only seem to be affected if I run unity or unity-2d.