Graham,
Well I think I was able to locally fix the gtk+2.2 breakage on
debian ppc sid. Noticing the bug report...
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=175923
..indicating non-PIC code in a shared lib I rebuilt gtk+2.0_2.2.0-1
with -fPIC -DPIC forced and resulting package eliminated all of
the problems with nautilus2.
Jack