Hello, I used to run a dual boot Karmic Koala and windows for quite some time, but problems with it made me upgrade to Natty. I changed my view to the classical style so as not to deal with Unity. However, on both setups, I have the same problem:

When I click to open up file directories in places, or icons on the desktop, the files open 8-20 minutes later, and usually don't work.

I can SOMETIMES get around this by using nautilus in terminal, but otherwise it's a real pain. I noticed that if the first action I do after logging in is to perform one of these actions, it works most of the time.

I am a newbie, but I haven't seen anyone else have this problem. Any ideas?

I never had any problem with nautilus (your file manager) in 11.04 but left Ubuntu behind very soon after that release. Problems could have developed after that. The lack of replies indicates that there is probably no widespread problem.

I would suspect that you upgraded and did not get a clean upgrade.

If you are not having any problems with your update/upgrades then the package manager is satisfied with the upgrade. This just leaves a problem with nautilus itself. You can't remove it as it is part of the gnome desktop environment.

I would however reinstall it.
just copy/paste that to your terminal and see if it helps.