You would think I would learn.
I have found through my experience with Gentoo that running emerge -u world is not as straight forward as they want you to think. I have once again ran into issues where programs suddenly become unstable after such an update. Nautilus dies quite regularly, and I can reproducibly kill it by mounting my cdrom via the desktop icon. Unfortunately I’m not that strong of a software developer to be able to completely interpret the stack-trace.
It seems like re-emerging glib, gnome-vfs, and nautilus seems to correct the issue.
My complaint, and recommendation, is that there needs to be greater testing of an ebuild before it’s distributed through the stable portage tree. In comparison to other binary distributions, I don’t expect I would have ever seen these kinds of issues with their stable package repositories. Fortunately I’ve grown to enjoy the challenge of determining what is wrong. Unfortunately with the lack of processing power on my desktop, this results in a lot of delays while packages compile.