Nautilus doesn't let me open files with the default application

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

When I select a file and:

- double-click
- hit RET
- hit C-o
- select "Open with <the-default-application>" in the menu

Nautilus only refreshes the current window, placing the selected file at
the top and nothing else (where I expect that it should launch the
application, passing to it the selected file name).

The only way I found to convince Nautilus to really pass those files to
the corresponding application is to select "Open with other application"
and then to select the desired (usually the default) application in the
dialog box.

This is on a Debian stable machine where this operation used to work
just fine until very recently (maybe it changed when I installed the
10.1 update?  I'm not sure if it's correlated but it's possible).

Any idea what might be going on, how to investigate, or how to fix it?


        Stefan