On an Ubuntu 12.04 system, fatrace is showing a never ending stream of xfdesktop(19996): O /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): R /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): C /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): O /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): R /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): C /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): O /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): R /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg xfdesktop(19996): C /usr/share/icons/Tango/scalable/status/user-trash-full.svg ... A small sampling had 30 O/R/C groupings in 10 seconds.
Created attachment 5402 Filter out changed events for special icons Ouch, that's a lot of events. It would have to be from GIO generating events of some sort to cause it to reload like that. This patch will prevent xfdesktop from reacting to change events on special icons which will hopefully prevent those file accesses and the same when downloading files to the home folder if it's enabled. It would only mask your real issue -- why GIO is going crazy? Hopefully Ubuntu's 14.04 fixes that if/when you upgrade to that.
Pushed this patch to master in: http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfdesktop/commit/?id=f3f876d5dd501dba794153341b8f7747037f9c32 and it's available as of 4.11.5 (so it will be available in ubuntu 14.04 and xfce's 4.12 releases respectively). Marking resolved.