Seems wired, especially when you are doing the same thing over a remote connection to your Ubuntu server.
After a research among the materials on the Internet, a solution is found without installing any other components as mentioned by the other gurus. Try this in the terminal:
gksu is the command to open GUI program in the terminal while & sign keeps this as a separate process after initialization.
dbus-launch does do the tricks, i.e. network browsing.
For detailed explanation, please read this:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/dbus-launch
