Comment 16 for bug 386199

Matthias Clasen from Red Hat tackled the underlying gtk+ bug ( http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=585626 ) and has committed a patch to gtk+ head that dramatically improves things.

See the gtk+ bug I've linked to for his patch, and some instructions I've written on easily applying the fix to your Ubuntu system without having to change anything else if you suffer from the same issue.