gnome menu and desktop icons directory preference SL 6.1

[Yasha Karant]

I have solve a mystery of vanishing icons from panels, menus, and the 
desktop under gnome SL 6.1 .

On my laptop SL 6.1 system, it appears that /usr/local/share/icons/ is 
the preferred search path before /usr/share/icons/ , and even if an icon 
is present in a subdirectory of
/usr/share/icons/ it may not be displayed if the icon is not in a 
subdirectory of /usr/local/share/icons/

Does anyone understand the cause of this?  I have not modified the 
search paths of any systems level entry; even when I logged-in as root 
(not recommended), application specific icons were not displayed until 
/usr/local/share/icons/ had appropriate instances, despite those 
instances being in
/usr/share/icons/

If this is not typical, I suspect that one of the application RPMs that 
I loaded from a repository or source other than SL6x may have altered a 
system level icon search path.  Which file/files in which directory(ies) 
control the icon search path of gnome in EL 6.1?  A cursory search of 
the web and the extant documentation does not present an answer.

Yasha Karant