Gnome Appearance Properties doesn't work when /home folder mounted using NFS; affects the log out dialog

Binary package hint: ubuntu-desktop

In a Polish High School I work for, we use Ubuntu on most of our computers. Since Ubuntu 6.06 we use NIS/NFS configuration very similar to this described in How To articles on Ubuntu Community Wiki. My tests with Ubuntu 8.04 using this configuration reviled a new problem that wasn't there in Ubuntu 7.10 or any other previous version.

It only occurs when the /home folder is mounted form our central server using NFS (after mounting a local /home folder everything works fine). I tested this on three different computers, using both existing and new user accounts.

Those are the symptoms:

1. It takes a ridiculously long time for the gnome-appearance-properties (System/Preferences/Appearance) window to show up. The one time I used a stop watch to count it took 2 minutes and 10 seconds (compared to the usual 1 second).

2. When the window finally appears it's unresponsive and the only thing you can do with it is to kill it

3. For some reason during this time (when waiting for the Appearance window to appear) you can't invoke the log out dialog (the one that normally appears when user click the red button in the top right corner of the screen). It will finally appear, responsive, but only after the unresponsive Appearance window did. Other windows and programs I tested doesn't share this problem. Log out dialog seems to work normally, as long as one don't try to open the gnome-appearance-properties window.