Description of problem: If I disable the desktop icons via the /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop gconf key, they disappear. If I re-enable them, they don't re-appear. I noticed that nautilus was not running, so I opened a folder to see if the icons would re-appear then. They didn't. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): nautilus-2.14.1-1.fc5.1
Exactly what do you mean. How could the icons show up when nautilus isn't even running? However, if show_desktop is true and you launch nautilus (and it wasn't running before) you should get a desktop with icons. Unless ---no-desktop was passed to nautilus. How did you "open a folder"?
Just try this: gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false sleep 1 gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop true After I do this, my desktop icons are still hidden. How did I open a folder? The Places menu. As far as the question "How could the icons show up when nautilus isn't even running?", I don't know the answer. But I'd expect that re-enabling show_desktop would, you know, show the desktop. It doesn't.
Nautilus is the thing listening to the changes to the setting, but if show_desktop is false and there are no other nautilus windows open then nautilus will not be running, so it can't detect the change. We could either keep nautilus running anyway just to solve this issue, or create a daemon specifically to listen to this change and keep that in the session. The problem doesn't seem important enought for either of the solutions to be worth it.