Since a number of weeks I am having a strange issue with nautilus. Before when I inserted a CD, I would be prompted for an action, if I inserted a USB stick it would be automatically mounted and shown and disk partitions that were not automatically mounted at boot time were shown under Devices in the Places pane. Then a number of weeks ago this just stopped working, I have a hunch that this happened when I created an additional account that was activated for automatic login for a while. I have found out that when I just kill the initial nautilus -n instance started by gnome-session and then restart it from the desktop it will show the available devices (like an inserted CD) and I can then mount them by clicking. (Alternatively I can logout from the desktop and back on again). Still, this is pretty annoying to have to do time and again. Yes I know about the configuration settings that have to do with this and yes the automount settings are activated.
I thought that there was maybe a relationship with the automatic logon but that appears not to be the case, if I disable that nautilus is still failing to show the devices the first time I login but showing them after logging out and back in again. This is Ubuntu 11.10 32 bit, fully updated.