How to restore desktop?

[Joe Smith]

Aaron Konstam wrote:
> ...
> Your parameter list looks correct. But that is not much help.
> I assume that /apps/nautilus/preferences
> show_desktop is also true.

$ gconftool-2 -a /apps/nautilus/preferences
  ...
  desktop_is_home_dir = false
  ...
  show_desktop = true
  ,,,

Ok, I got it. I started poking around in my dot-files, figuring it must 
be some kind of cached setting, and ended up focusing on two dirs: 
~/{.config,.nautlius}. Removing those 'fixed' the problem but also wiped 
out the desktop items I *want*, and my startup apps.

Poking around inside those dirs, I found:
$ cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Download"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

And of course, changing that to XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop" saved 
the day.

After I had simply changed the setting with a text editor, based on the 
comment in the file, I fiddled around a bit and came to this command, 
which also works:
$ xdg-user-dirs-update --set DESKTOP $HOME/Desktop
$ grep DESK ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"

Seems like whoever detected at login that ~/Desktop was missing and 
helpfully changed this setting, fscked up. At least in this case, it was 
not a very helpful strategy.

<Joe