Comment 19 for bug 76283

I just ran into the same feature. I decided to play around a little. In case my observation can help shed some light on the issue, here they are:

Background:
I am running Feisty Workstation, with few customization, VMWare server the only non Ubuntu add-on (observations below were made on the host, not a VM). I have an external USB disk with two partitions on it. As it is pretty much plugged in permanently they would ideally result in two additional device icons once the desktop is fully started up. Here is what I actually saw:

[1] The first time ever I connected the USB drive I got the expected two icons.

[2] The next time I rebooted the system I got four icons, two for each partition, both actually connecting to the appropriate file system.

[3] On consecutive reboots, I get two, three, or four icons, most commonly four, three is the second most often.

[4] When consulting .nautilus/metafiles/x-nautilus-desktop:%2F%2F%2F.xml (the only file that seems to reference those partitions), I find two entries for each of the two partitions in question.

[5] Removing the duplicate entries and restarting gdm will "fix" the problem for the time being for the next restart of gdm or the next system reboot, but the "fix" does not persist across the next reboot after. Rather, .nautilus/metafiles/x-nautilus-desktop:%2F%2F%2F.xml regains the duplicate entries.

[6] If I remove the original entries and keep the duplicates--- ditto.

[7] If I remove all four partition entries--- ditto.

[8] The number of icons shown will vary across restarting gdm; so a full reboot is _not_ necessary to trigger the problem. If anything restarting gdm tends to fix the problem (got two icons twice in a row). However, I haven't tried often enough to consider my sample size valid.

Hope that this is enough of a pattern to get to narrow it down. Let me know if I can be of help---

FL