2010/6/2 Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@gmail.com>
I've (partly) figured it out. The fault appears to be in an interaction
with Nautilus. Nautilus is running because I use a Dropbox applet, which
has a nautilus front-end.

I'm using Dropbox this way: http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/TextBasedLinuxInstall and I don't need to install Nautilus at all.
--
Christian González G.
http://chgonzalez.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/chgonzalez