Comment 84 for bug 325973

I have found no problems with setting nautilus.desktop as read-only. but I have found that after an update, the problem exists again (because it's run as root, the file can be edited whether it's read-only or not).
I have found that if I open a gnome-terminal (if you can get to it before nautilus takes all of your cpu) or go to a tty and type "killall nautilus" it will work. however, sometimes I have to continually press Up and Enter to get it to work (running the command just once doesn't always work).