Every time I use Nautilus and navigate to a specific subdirectory inside my home directory, Nautilus instantly closes, and the desktop wallpaper disappears too. The computer appears to continue just fine apart from this glitch, but I am never able to open that subdirectory.

I can use a terminal and ls -al in the subdirectory and I don't see anything obviously wrong to a newbie's eye. There are around 30 files in there, total maybe 200kB, mostly plaintext log files plus a few php files.

I've also just rebooted into recovery mode and ran the fsck option, just to make sure there's nothing corrupt going on, but it didn't resolve the problem.

I still think that there's some kind of file corruption going on, but I have run out of ideas.

This is a fully updated version of plain Ubuntu 13.10 without any memorable hacks or customizations (apart from moving /home to a 1TB drive while Ubuntu runs off of an SSD). The physical computer is almost new and has lots of memory; I don't think it's in any way hardware-related.

How can I troubleshoot a faulty subdirectory?