The problem (as I told walters yesterday on irc) is this:

When rhythm box is searching for media in a folder tree, if that tree has
cycles caused by symbolic links, then the scanning might never end.

In this case either rhythmbox needs to detect these loops or they should
provide a "stop scanning" menu item, so that if a user runs into this
problem by mistake, he can atleast stop it, without killing the rhythmbox
application.

I tend to put symlinks to other ppls home directories in my home directory,  :)
hope this helps
Spundun