Comment 28 for bug 329146

UPDATE: Removing "vlc" and "samba" didn't seem to do anything. Desktop icons are still missing upon startup. The desktop icons do show up after I open a nautilus folder.

To expand on my setup/situation...

I just started having this problem today in Ubuntu 10.04. It started out as I wasn't able to see panels, desktop icons, or window borders and Alt+F2 didn't work either among several other problems. The entire desktop was useless -- I couldn't do anything. This all occurred after I performed some system updates, installed Minitube and Minitunes. I was doing some system maintenance so to pin point what started this issue would be tough.

So I reinstalled a brand new (downloaded from ubuntu.com today) copy of 10.04. The initial startup was problem-free, but somewhere after installing apps/updates I started experiencing problems. The desktop environment was functional at least, but the gnome-panel and desktop icons weren't showing up (Fix for my gnome-panel problem is in my above post).

Applications I installed: Parcellite Clipboard Manager, GIMP, Pidgin, Adobe Reader, Songbird, Docky, Ubuntu Tweak, and medibuntu, restricted extras, codecs and those things. I also uninstalled some default software like Rhythmbox and Empathy.

I am using elementary theme and nautilus-elementary breadcrumbs.

Ubuntu Tweak settings are as follows:
Compiz Settings: No boxes checked
Desktop Icon Settings: Shop desktop icons
GNOME Settings: Enable Panel Animations, Show icons in menus, Show icons on buttons
Window Manager Settings: Use Metacity window theme, Enable window transparency
Session control: File Manger: nautilus / Panel: gnome-panel / Window Manger: gnome-wm