Netbook-launcher hangs on startup if an NFS directory is bookmarked and server has problems

Binary package hint: netbook-launcher

Yesterday I booted up my netbook and the netbook-launcher hung just displaying the pane down the left side ('Favorites', etc). Trying to log out or reboot brought up a box saying that netbook-launcher wasn't responding and did I want to log out/reboot anyway?

Eventually I realised that the problem was that it was trying to do something with my file manager bookmarks, three of which point to directories which are automounted from NFS. I could see the system trying to mount those directories and not succeeding, the mount process apparently permanently hung up.

I rebooted, disabled the automounter before logging in, and then netbook-launcher came up fine. I deleted those bookmarks and rebooted, leaving the automounter enabled, and again it came up fine. I then realised that the NFS server had rebooted yesterday morning due to a power failure, and it wasn't responding correctly to the requests, and once that was resolved I was able to automount the directories again.

So part of this was a problem external to the netbook, in that the NFS server was screwed up after the power failure. But ideally that shouldn't cause the netbook-launcher app to completely lock up and fail to start, because the only way I could even get a terminal to disable NFS was to use CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a text console. I'm guessing this may also happen if it can't see the NFS server at all, such as when connecting to a public WIFI network; I was expecting that it wouldn't do anything to bookmarked directories unless I explicitly opened them, but it appears to be trying to read them regardless.

This is UNR 9.10 with the latest patches as of November 16th on an Eee PC 1005HAB.