I was getting pretty pissed off at Nautilus because it was taking ages to display directory contents, plus hogging CPU, and occasionally RAM, too. I didn’t recall having done any updates to it, and it used to work just fine, even in music and photo directories with upwards of 1000 files. It was getting so bad that I seriously considered updating my backups and finally getting around to the Intrepid upgrade I’ve been putting off since I installed 8.10 on my laptop and just sort of “lost interest” with the desktop because it works well. Then, I remembered messing around with stuff last Saturday and tried to recall what I’d done. I couldn’t, so I poked about for a while and finally discovered…

System > Preferences > Assistive Technologies…and “Enable” was checked.

I remember now that I was playing with festival, just for the hell of it, but forgot to turn off AT, so Nautilus was dutifully preparing to read stuff to me if I wanted, and magnify anything I couldn’t see quite well enough. Very thoughtful of it, but I can see just fine (for now, at least), so I don’t think I need it at the moment. Duh! You’d think that someone who guards every MB of memory and every CPU cycle like a starving dog would have remembered to turn the resource pig off, but no.