Bug#557193: gnome: [Solved - sort of] Attempting to logout -- popup window saying "File Manager not responding"

[Rick Thomas]

On Nov 21, 2009, at 10:06 PM, Rick Thomas wrote:

> Josselin Mouette wrote:
>> Le vendredi 20 novembre 2009 à 01:36 -0500, Rick Thomas a écrit :
>>> When Gnome starts up, the desktop icons do not appear.
>>>
>>> When I try to logout,  get a popup window saying "File Manager not  
>>> responding".
>>> There is an option to logout anyway.  If I choose that, it logs  
>>> out successfully.
>>>
>>> This behavior seems to only occur after the first time I log in.
>>> The first time after a reboot, everything happens as expected --  
>>> desktop
>>> icons appear and logout goes without a hitch.
>>>
>>> This is a test machine, so I can load experimental software on it  
>>> if necessary.
>>
>> Well, no need for experimental. Does it still happen if you upgrade
>> nautilus and gnome-session to the unstable versions?
>>
>> Cheers,
> Sadly, that did not help.


Well, now I know what caused it:

The machine in question has a zip drive that is semi-non-functional.   
I was getting "interrupt timed out" on /dev/hdd.

When I disconnected the zip drive (I don't plan to use it anymore -  
USB flash drives are more practical these days...) the problem went  
away.

It looks like the file manager was polling /dev/hdd and not getting  
any response -- waiting for a timeout...

I'd like to leave this report open -- perhaps at "wishlist" priority  
-- as a way of hoping that, in the future, a more graceful way can be  
found to deal with this sort of malfunctioning non-critical hardware...

Thanks for the help!

Rick