Comment 3 for bug 719769

The only sync call is get_bus() and that doesn't touch the bus in 99.9999% of the times you call it :-)

I realize now, however, that my logic is flawed - I assumed that you can always just listen for "notify::unity-running", but that signal may have fired before you ever connect to it (say - if the inspector was used by a gio module or something). So perhaps a sync call to NameHasOwner is in order here - it wont be that bad because it's a call to the bus daemon and not some random process...