Comment 1 for bug 1047083

Here are some suggestions you might try:

Run Variety in a terminal with -vv option: "/opt/extras.ubuntu.com/variety/bin/variety -vv" and see if there any exceptions there or anything suspicious around the moment when Nautilus crashes. E.g. it might be some specific image that is causing the wallpaper subsystems in Ubuntu to misbehave (and specifically Nautilus).

Remove or comment everything in the .config/variety/scripts/set_wallpaper - Variety should work on Unity/Gnome even without this file, and there it runs additional commands to set the wallpaper on other DEs, so something there might be causing the problem.

Run gnome-tweak-tool and there uncheck "Have file manager handle the desktop" and see if it is better that way.

Personally I doubt this is caused specifically by Variety, and I suppose it is a problem of the Ubuntu subsytems related to wallapper drawing for a couple of reasons:

-The only thing Variety does to change the wallpaper is to point the wallpaper setting in GSetting to the new wallpaper file. From there on it is GNOME settings daemon, Nautilus, Compiz, etc. actually updating the wallpaper - Variety plays no role there. On my PC even if Variety puts some completely random junk in this setting (e.g. a path to a non-existing file), then the result is that the wallpaper becomes blank, nothing crashes.

-Variety does not instruct GNOME how to draw the wallpaper (Zoom, Scale, Stretch or whatever) - GNOME uses it's own setting for this (see it in Appearance settings). Variety provides no options for this and has no logic related to this.