As nobody has complained about this lately and the numbers in the end of the bug report suggest we now have "good" numbers again, I'm marking this as fixed.
** Changed in: linux-source-2.6.15 (Ubuntu) Status: Needs Info => Fix Released -- Reduced I/O performance when logged into GNOME https://launchpad.net/bugs/21790 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs