nautilus-1.0.4 from rawhide will periodically hang completely (the desktop stops being redrawn, and file manager windows stop redrawing themselves.) I don't see a pattern to the freezes, but they last for twenty or thirty seconds at a time. top(1) shows nothing out of the ordinary, though on several occasions fam seemed to be using a few percent of CPU time. i've not observed this with cvs builds of nautilus. however, i didn't build those with fam.
I believe i know the reason for this. If you go to preferences -> speed tradeoffs and set "Preview Sound Files" to "Never", does this go away? If so this is an esound bug that i have fixed (not in rawhide yet).
I've disabled sound previewing. It'll be a bit before I can tell for sure whether the hangs have gone away.
Did disabling sound preview fix this?
Yes, I think that fixed it.
Then I'll just close this bug. You can turn it on again once you've installed esound 0.2.22-4 or later.