Nautilus keeps trying to access a folder that doesn't exist

Question

Whenever I boot into Ubuntu, as soon as I login, I get a dialogue window pop up that says Couldn't find "/media/[long string here]". Please check the spelling and try again."

Upon looking at my /etc/fstab file I found out that long string is actually the UUID of the root partition.

I also found out that exactly the same thing happens if I do nautilus -q in the terminal. I then created a folder /media/<long string here>. Now, instead of getting that error dialogue box, a regular nautilus window opens at that folder (on both situations described above).

It is clear that whenever the nautilus process starts (which happens on login and on nautilus -q) it tries to access that folder instead of starting quietly. What's going on here, and how can I fix this? It doesn't really break anything else, it's just annoying.

EDIT:
Here is the output of ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 180 2010-10-21 10:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 2010-10-21 08:02 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 2010-10-21 10:02 221643331643076F -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 2010-10-21 10:02 34e5211a-ad8f-4ffe-b3f8-b70b767fd993 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 2010-10-21 10:02 4b41a6d6-0a8b-4ece-a7c4-712901fbf7b0 -> ../../sda8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 2010-10-21 10:02 7c1303c4-02c0-4970-b653-1c6bd78938fa -> ../../sda6
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 2010-10-21 10:02 9480DE4180DE2A0E -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 2010-10-21 10:02 c8c3aef2-360d-4fbc-ac31-a4e4dc57c110 -> ../../dm-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  10 2010-10-21 10:02 e08c11e3-1c5c-474c-a9d6-b7e7ba095fa7 -> ../../sda7

The fifth line of this output contains the UUID that nautilus keeps trying to open. /dev/sda8/ is my root partition.
Here is the output of /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
/dev/mapper/home   /home           ext3     defaults    1       2
# / was on /dev/sda8 during installation, with UUID=4b41a6d6-0a8b-4ece-a7c4-712901fbf7b0.
/dev/sda8        /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/sda6       none            swap    sw              0       0

As you can see I've got an encrypted home partition, a swap, and a root partition on the fstab file. Again, that UUID on the tenth line is the one nautilus keeps trying to open as /media/<UUID>.

Here's the error message I get, for reference:

Answer 1

Turns out it's an issue with the startup applications. I am almost certain it was caused by copying my configs from my previous (lucid) instalation to this new one (maverick). Following Bobby's suggestion, here's what I did.

1. Open System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications -> Options
2. Close any currently running applications.
3. Hit Remember Currently Running Applications.