I searched in Google, and reached the following discussion and was surprised to see that the seemingly best answer was pushed back, so I thought it would be wise to repeat it here when the need returns again (I'm quoting the heart of Antonio's answer there):
- Find your gvfs folder and [USER ID]
 $ mount | grep gvfs gvfsd-fuse
-  List mount points used by gvfs$ ls -als /run/user/[USER ID]/gvfs
 (as gvfs isn't working, this would produce an empty folder's content list)
- Check whether the gvfsddaemon process is active$ ps axu | grep gvfsd
- Kill it with the following cmd.
 $ sudo killall -9 gvfsd
- relaunch the daemon (process)
 $ sudo /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-fuse /run/user/[USER ID]/gvfs
- Now, shutdown the system and restart it (doing this without steps 1-5 will not work...)
