I have a OpenSUSE 10.3 distro with GNOME desktop with Clearview theme. While cleaning my files I selected all files in /tmp and deleted using Nautilus. Result nearly 100s of Nautilus clients opened and even after rebooting I had to close manually one by one.

Now the problem is I could not see any of the Desktop shortcuts. They are present in the Desktop folder if I do a ls. But I am unable to see on GNOME desktop. I could not even create a shortcut.

Any answers? - please do not suggest to create a new user, I tried and that works fine.

First, don't delete files that you have no idea of why they exist in the first place. Just because they're in /tmp doesn't mean the system doesn't need them for some reason.

I'm not really sure of your exact issue, but deleting ~/.nautilus may help you. You may also need to empty out (not delete) ~/.gnome2. If you have a ~/nautilus-debug-log.txt that may shed some light on what's going on as well.

Bravo!
The method you specified is working precisely and I got back all my icons. Luckily when I was deleting the /tmp, I logged in as user, not as root that saved me.

--------- background on deleting /tmp files ------------------
I was trying to take a system backup using a GUI tool instead of tar - my intention was to take incremental backup. While I was in between, it prompted me very low diskspace. Then I thought tmp is useless and selected all files in Nautilus and pressed Delete. Gosh!! 100s of Nautilus opened. I could not kill all. Even after reboot it existed. Started killing one by one. Somehow when I reached killing the last Nautilus window, Desktop got disappeared.
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Had you been not telling me this solution of deleting ~/.nautilus and ~./gnome2 contents, I thought of populating my home directory with all ~/. files (hidden files). Would that have worked?

Thanks a million for pointing to one correct solution.

I'm not sure what you mean by populating your home directory with the contents of ~/, these are one and the same. However, chances are that some file in your dotfiles was launching nautilus in a loop, and replacing your dotfiles with those under /etc/skel (the default user files - these get copied to /home/username/ when you create a user) wouldn't have overwritten it.

The solution works because both Gnome and Nautilus will create a new dotfile (~/.gnome2 and ~/.nautilus) if you log in and they aren't present.

Your desktop icons are controlled by Nautilus, which is why you lost them when you killed the last process. For future reference, if some app is continually launching like that, you can do "killall -9 process_name" which will kill all of those processes.