I was able to reproduce this by launching lots of gnome-help instances, exhausting all of my machine's memory, observing various processes being killed, killall gnome-help, manually closing/cancelling various bugbuddy windows, and then observing that I can't run gnome programs.
In pstree: +-update-notifier---gnome_segv2---sh---bug-buddy attached gdb to the update-notifier process, attached gdb bt and registers. ** Attachment added: "gdb bt and registers of crashed update-notifier process" http://librarian.launchpad.net/5279120/gdb.txt -- Mysterious segfault of many GNOME programs makes gnome-session unresponsive https://launchpad.net/bugs/74682 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
