This problem has been driving me nuts for as long as I can remember. I would have reported it sooner if I'd pinpointed its cause. Every alternate time I login to Xfce, the splash-screen hangs on "Starting Thunar" and "Performing Autostart" for a few seconds each. It then takes over half a minute to load the desktop. For the rest of the session, it's just as slow to start any applications. No errors or warnings are reported in the "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" file and nothing much of interest is shown on the screen either. I've tried some common workarounds - like deleting "~/.config/autostart/", "~/.config/xfce4/" and "~/.cache/sessions/" beforehand - without any success. I think this is an Xfce-specific problem, because I can re-login to KDE all day without encountering any noticeable slowdowns. This problem is occurring on my 32-bit and 64-bit Arch Linux installations. How can I fix it or where else should I be looking for an explanation?
Created attachment 3593 The X-session errors
I should have mentioned that this problem occurs regardless of whether I'm launching Xfce via 'startx' or from 'kdm'. I've attached the ".xsession-errors" file that's generated in the latter case. Let me know if you want to see anything else.
I've just discovered that this issue also occurs with Gnome, so maybe it's more closely related to GTK+. FYI, I've posted a report to the Gnome bug tracker here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646678
Xavion, Could you please provide the following: - your ~/.xinitrc and startxfce4 scripts if any different from the Arch default - your ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml So we can find out what you are running. Are you running any GNOME software along with your XFCE session? Under what version of the GLib can the bug be reproduced? In particular do you use GNOME Screensaver? It seems to be asking for org.gnome.SessionManager and hanging on it, but that is not provided as it is not a standard DBus name. There is an option in the Xfce4 session UI to enable GDM compatibility. Does the issue occur when this option is turned off/on? I also see a mention of GVFS-RemoteVolumeMonitor, a very quick search yielded this: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=833793 which seems related to your problem. Do you have any software that expects a remote filesystem or an external device to be available? We'll need a bit more information to find out whether there is an actual bug in Xfce. In the mean time this report should probably be set to invalid as it seems GNOME/GLib related.
I'm pleased to report that it looks like this problem has gone away over time. These days, I can re-login to my DEs multiple times without experiencing lockups. Should it ever return, I will try to collect the information you've requested.
Thank you for getting back to us, Xavion! Could you please change the report status to RESOLVED -> WORKSFORME for now, and reopen it if you experience the issue again?
I actually thought about doing that yesterday, but wasn't sure which resolution option I should choose.