While playing around with overriding the default menu layout using $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS I realized it wasn't working because we're generating these files which merge in the system wide layout. Clearly, we shouldn't be generating these files at all.
Hmm? I thought that's how menu editing should be working, the local user could override the system layout... When you modify a menu, a local .menu file is created which merges in the system menus, but then has a delete/exclude of certain items... I'm not quite sure what you mean here by "shouldn't be generating these files at all". Do you mean we shouldn't be generating the local-user .menu files? If not, how would the local user modify the menus on a per-user basis (if we want that, which I thought we did)?
Sorry, should have explained better - this is without any menu editing. Create test user, log in, you've got the files. That's what doesn't make sense. This could well be the pleasecreate patch in gnome-vfs2, moving to there.
Doesn't happen with gnome-menus in rawhide