On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 07:40 +1200, Nick Rout wrote: > what does ls -l ~/Desktop tell you?
IIRC, when I ran ls -l ~/Desktop early on in the investigation, the output showed the same files that I saw by opening a Nautilus window via Places > Desktop. When I booted up this morning the problem was gone. The desktop is now showing the contents of ~/Desktop. Running ls -l ~/Desktop and comparing with the GUI version (with "View Hidden Files" ticked), the outputs are equivalent. Between when I sent the request for help and this morning, I had powered down and rebooted the laptop at least twice (it doesn't get left running because electrical energy is limited here, and suspend-to-RAM crashes more often than not). I'm very happy to have my desktop back, but puzzled. =====Andrew
