The bug has been opened on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/218070

"Binary package hint: nautilus

After an upgrade to hardy, nautilus is often not showing the desktop icons & wallpaper, although the process itself is still running. Attaching strace to it shows it continually trying to read from a socket:

restart_syscall(<... resuming interrupted call ...>) = 0
gettimeofday({1208331785, 315126}, NULL) = 0
stat64("/home/ajmitch/.recently-used.xbel", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=118622, ...}) = 0
read(3, 0x819489c, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
gettimeofday({1208331785, 316371}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=8, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=13, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=14, events=POLLIN}, {fd=19, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=18, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=10, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=26, events=POLLIN}, {fd=31, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=21, events=POLLIN}, {fd=17, events=POLLIN}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}], 16, 4997) = 1
read(20, "l\4\1\1\254\0\0\0\202\6\0\0\255\0\0\0\1\1o\0?\0\0\0/or"..., 2048) = 364
read(20, 0xb5b51008, 2048) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
read(3, 0x819489c, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)"


The ubuntu bug has some duplicates, one user mentionned that fc9 has the same issue, the bug seems to happen randomly, bug #543744 could be the same issue