Pulseaudio hanging X login with NFS mounted homedir

[Sean E. Millichamp]

I seem to have an odd problem where having my homedir on an NFS mount
seems to break pulseaudio.

My desktop NFS mounts its homedirs from a CentOS 4.6 server.  Upon
logging in the GDM login screen disappears but it hangs before the
desktop draws much of anything.  My normal desktop is Gnome, but I've
tried KDE and XFCE with similar results.

I have found (mostly through trial and error) that if I kill -9 the PID
of:

sean     10360  0.2  0.1 176220  3792 ?        Sl   16:02   0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --log-target=syslog

Then my login finishes with a seemingly working desktop but with an
error from gnome-settings-daemon.

I have tried emptying my home dir to a clean slate and the problem still
occurs.  I have also tried moving my home directory from the NFS mount
to a local path and that makes the problem disappear - so it definitely
seems NFS-related.  I have also tried setting SELinux to permissive mode
and there is no change in behavior.

The only thing I see that is "odd" is this is in the process list before
I kill the pulseaudio process:

sean     10358  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    16:02   0:00 [xrdb] <defunct>

I don't have any more idea as to what the problem might be.  Has anyone
else seen anything like this with NFS mounted home directories?  Unless
someone has a suggestion I plan on opening a bug.

Thanks!

Sean