I had exactly the same problem. I think the problem was with some mime
file used by Nautilus rather than Gnome itself. I started with an alpha
5 version of Jaunty and upgraded regularly. I think it was when I did
dist-upgrade that the problem started. The "random black text" is not
random: it is the contents of the file from text editor's point of view
which can obviously seem like garbage in the case of avi, zip etc files.
The file association re-assignment did not happen randomly with me.
Initially every file was opening with text editor. I then used

system -> preferences -> prefered applications

to set avi files to open with movie player. From then on all files (eg
.zip, .jpg etc) would open with movie player. I tried some of the ideas
I found on the internet such as renaming ~/.gconf ~/.gconfd ~/.local and
~/.nautilus but this didn't help. Plus the problem occured with all
users so it was clearly something system wide. I looked at

/usr/share/applications/defaults.list
/usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

and they seemed sane to my untrained eye. I decided to try another file
manager to see if it had the same problem and did

sudo apt-get install rox-filer

When I started rox I saw that all the file associations were back to
normal with the icons accurately reflecting the file's contents. I can't
remember whether I had to log out and log in again but the install of
rox fixed the Nautilus file associations. I was now back to normal with
Nautilus displaying the correct icons and launching the right
application on double click. There was clearly some common rox /
nautilus file that was re-installed.

-- 
file associations and file icons disappeared, random text on screen.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/302715
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