KDE is now capable of letting the user choose the directory to represent the desktop. The RedHat modified version of startkde, however, still copies Desktop from the skeleton directory whenever ${HOME}/Desktop is not present, using the default name. Thus if one changes the desktop directory in the control center and then logs in again, an erroneous second desktop directory with the old name is always forced into existence.
Don't do that then(tm). We need to "mess with" the Desktop files for translations and stuff to work properly. Reading them out using kreadconfig won't work because kreadconfig depends on a running instance of kded, and we're generating the desktop directories earlier than that. Using grep, awk and friends to parse the config files would be too much overhead. The best workaround for the problem I can think of right now is to copy the desktop files unless ~/.kde/share/config/kdesktoprc already exists (this file contains the setting for the correct desktop directory), but that would mess up people who ran rm -rf * in their home directory... Anyway, this is a minor problem; I'll check if I can find a good fix the next time I update the packages.