I found a small bug in the GStreamer build system, introduced at the start of April, which exposes a bug in the registry cache.
The end result, sadly, is that applications based on GStreamer end up opening a bunch of plugins (sometimes ALL of them) every time they start.
Neatly, the problem only on happens in packaged builds where a –with-package-name or –with-package-origin is being passed to configure, so there was never any chance we’d see it in CVS.
Packagers of various distros that have built packages for GStreamer in the last 6 weeks should take a look at:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341479