My system: Lenovo t431s, 12.04. LAMP stack (it's used for web development), otherwise pretty vanilla.
Applications occasionally freezes when accessing the home folder.
I think I saw advice suggesting a reboot when this happens, but I can't find that page again.
Take with a grain of salt, I don't think it is related to any GUI because it also happens in the terminal. In the case of being in terminal, if I "ls" in ~/, it stops responding. It's not happening now, so I can't remember if Ctrl-C restores control.
It's intermittent: usually I have no trouble, but once the home folder becomes unavailable, it doesn't come back. What I mean by that, even when opening Nautilus, another terminal window, etc., I won't be able to see the files in the home folder until I reboot.
I realized yesterday that this problem also causes trouble with apps. I installed EasyTag and it always locked up. I figured out that EasyTag locked up because it was trying to read my home folder, and I fixed it by changing the default directory.
Is this a well-known problem (it's an old version) with a well-known solution? I can't find it. I could upgrade to 14.04, but without seeing a discussion of the problem, I can't be sure it's fixed there. I don't want the potential hassle of an upgrade without some reasonable expectation that it fixes the problem.
Best Answer
My fstab file mounts several shared folders on my home network to folders in my home directory. When I take my laptop out, the links are broken.
I only noticed the problem when I attempted to use a program that wanted to read my home directory. Since I don't do that often, the issue felt intermittent.
Remove those lines from the fstab, and to make a script file (and launcher) to mount those folders when I need them.