Issue with (mostly) fat32 devices, and HAL fails to even initialize after new login

This issue seems to be caused, or perhaps may have been uncovered, by a fix for a nautilus crasher bug, that I reported earlier:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/47619

I was going to file this report under the nautilus package, but as you will see, I later found out this seems to have more serious systemwide implications

I'm currently still using Dapper, with all the updates from dapper-updates + dapper-backports.

1. nautilus works fine for some time.
2. after some time not touching nautilus (a few hours, in my case overnight), changing directories on a few filesystems (so far seems only fat32 filesystems, ext3 gives no issue) freezes nautilus with 0% CPU usage.
3. the solution has been to either attach a debuger, get a backtrace, and detach it; this usually unfreezes nautilus, or simply kill the nautilus process.
4. after this, trying to browse folders on a fat32 fs (but not opening the device's root directory), or trying to move something to the trashbin (no matter what fs), freezes nautilus as well.
5. So since nautilus won't work correctly, I try to log out from the logout dialogue. This doesn't log me out, so I have to press ctrl+alt+backspace.

6. When I log back in from gdm, the the desktop doesn't load correctly; the gnome panels don't load completely (i.e. appear blank) and nautilus doesn't seem to load at all. More importantly, I get a warning saying the system couldn't load HAL: "Internal error: failed to initialize HAL!"

7. So I try to get a screenshot of the warning, I run ksnapshot from a console, that was called by a custom keyboard shortcut alt+F3, since alt+F2 won't bring up the 'run command' dialogue.

8. I take the screenshot, but when I try to save it, the save dialogue for selecting the filename gives me an error when it tries to read a folder, i.e. I am unable to see any files since the save dialogue can't recognize any folders, but I manage to save the image.

9. I finally decide to just reboot.

A few notes:
- I still haven't figured out how to trigger this bug.
- It seems to me only newly started apps are affected by this, for example, when this bug is active, amarok hangs when I try to load it.
- if this really is related to HAL, would it help to get some sort of debug info about it?