Description of Problem: If I am not interested in a broken bloatware why I am pestered in ~/.xsession-errors with messages like "Unable to open desktop file applications:///Internet/evolution.desktop for panel launcher: Error reading file 'applications:///Internet/evolution.desktop': File not found Unable to open desktop file applications:///Office/redhat-word-processor.desktop for panel launcher: Error reading file 'applications:///Office/redhat-word-processor.desktop': File not found" It seems natural that these menu entries should belong to packages which they advertise instead to be scattered in random places. In the worst case a session launch code should be doing elementary checks and not to attempt to start things which do not exist.
It is doing a check, that's why it prints a message when the check fails. The main reason to print this is that if you're trying to customize the panel defaults for a lot of users, and you have a typo in your launcher filename, it's extremely frustrating to figure out what's going wrong if there are no error messages. If this happens every time you log in (instead of just the first time) and there aren't launchers on the panel in order to remove them, I buy that it's a bug, but if it just fails to create the launchers the first time, prints an error, and is silent thereafter, I think it's right to print these so that people trying to configure the panel don't go nuts wondering why it isn't working.
Upstream as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103273