Looks like I left out some machine information: the machine is using the i386 install (Pentium III 866MHz coppermine). Graphics card is an old nvidia card, not using the proprietary driver at the moment. The exact card probably doesn't matter because the crash reproduces in a VNC session as long as gnome-session is run.
Also in looking for related bugs which might render this a duplicate I saw some mention of file permissions in the user's home directory. I did find some files owned by root in some subdirectories, and chown'd them to my wife's account, but it didn't help. -- User-specific: Gnome file dialogs crash every time https://launchpad.net/bugs/58962 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
