My system: Lenovo t431s, 12.04. LAMP stack (it's used for web development), otherwise pretty vanilla.

Applications occasionally freezes when accessing the home folder.

I think I saw advice suggesting a reboot when this happens, but I can't find that page again.

Take with a grain of salt, I don't think it is related to any GUI because it also happens in the terminal. In the case of being in terminal, if I "ls" in ~/, it stops responding. It's not happening now, so I can't remember if Ctrl-C restores control.

It's intermittent: usually I have no trouble, but once the home folder becomes unavailable, it doesn't come back. What I mean by that, even when opening Nautilus, another terminal window, etc., I won't be able to see the files in the home folder until I reboot.

I realized yesterday that this problem also causes trouble with apps. I installed EasyTag and it always locked up. I figured out that EasyTag locked up because it was trying to read my home folder, and I fixed it by changing the default directory.

Is this a well-known problem (it's an old version) with a well-known solution? I can't find it. I could upgrade to 14.04, but without seeing a discussion of the problem, I can't be sure it's fixed there. I don't want the potential hassle of an upgrade without some reasonable expectation that it fixes the problem.