Comment 42 for bug 376145

I can confirm this too on Karmic.
Curiously HALd also refuses to start.

The error message telling gvfs-gdu-volume crashed comes very soon after logging in, together with an error message about bzr-notify crashing, as reported in bug #391158.

Running 'sudo hald --verbose=yes' gives no error messages, neither does running 'sudo /etc/init.d/hal start', even though its status is not running.

Running '/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor' doesn't give you the next emtpy line in the console, but doesn't output anything at all.

Both hal and gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor don't show up at all when you try to run them manually. The only remaining process with hal in it was gvfs-hal-volume(something?).