gdb hangs eternally when opening with upowerd core file

Today we noticed that the apport-retracers were hanging indefinitely with gdb spinning with 100% CPU power on retracing bug 1019781.

I can reproduce this manually with the attached upowerd binary (which is just the one from the Ubuntu 12.04 i386 upower package) and attached core dump (which is from bug 1019781) even in an environment where none of the actually used libraries are being installed. It happens in the reconstructed environment from the crash as well, and it behaves equally in precise and quantal with their respective gdb versions:

quantal-i386$ gdb upowerd core
GNU gdb (Ubuntu/Linaro 7.4-2012.04-0ubuntu2) 7.4-2012.04
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i686-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://bugs.launchpad.net/gdb-linaro/>...
Reading symbols from /home/ubuntu-archive/upowerd...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
[New LWP 4526]
[New LWP 4527]
[New LWP 4528]

warning: Can't read pathname for load map: Input/output error.

warning: .dynamic section for "/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libm.so.6" is not at the expected address (wrong library or
version mismatch?)

[... a few more warnings about library mismatches ...]

warning: Could not load shared library symbols for 8 libraries, e.g. /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpolkit-gobject-1.so.0.
Use the "info sharedlibrary" command to see the complete listing.
Do you need "set solib-search-path" or "set sysroot"?
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".

From here it's spinning eternally without further output. stracing gives a neverending stream of

_llseek(8, 135168, [135168], SEEK_SET) = 0

(with exactly the same numbers).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gdb 7.4-2012.06-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-2.2-generic 3.5.0-rc4
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-2-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.2.5-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Jul 12 12:18:30 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Alpha amd64 (20120627)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gdb
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)