brent I have used Caja before (I have Mate installed alongside Budgie), and it also fails to launch when the error is present (it gives a timeout error). I thought of Dolphin and Krusader, but I am reluctant to install them and bring in a bunch of KDE packages that might further complicate things... Maybe that concern is unfounded, but I did not want to find out the hard way.
I thought of a hardware issue because the error also effected Caja and file operations from other applications (such as opening a file from LibreOffice or Ghostwriter graphically). The weird thing is browsing and interacting with the files from the command line is fine. I use Vim a lot, so this has not been a major inconvenience. I also have Keybase installed, which might be a factor, but again I can still edit and update the files from the command line and Keybase is fine 🤷.
I also have been having an intermittent boot issue where it gets stuck on a blinking cursor, or says attempt to write to hd0. Hard powering off and rebooting usually gets it to boot fine though. With that said, the hard drive is a couple years old. I did install Windows on a separate drive, which is when the error seemed to start to occur, but it is so intermittent that it is really hard to tell where it's coming from.
All in all, a lot of on and off errors that may or may not be related.
I just reinstalled gvfs, so hopefully it goes away.
Thanks for your time.
