I have been using Mandrake for about 18 months now 8.2, 9.0, 9.1 and now 9.2

My GUI of choice is normally Gnome, but have dappled in KDE and Ice. I still have some Windoze tendencies though and I think this is one. I deleted all the files in /home/iain/tmp/orbit-iain (I now realise this was stupid!) and even though all the correct files still exist in ~/Desktop Gnome starts up without any icons and I am also unable to right click and modify the background or other properties (though I can still do this from the Configuration menu).

When I startup KDE the icons are on the desktop.

Any thoughts out there.

The desktop is drawn by nautilus. If the icons don't show up, this probably means nautilus is not running. I don't know why anything in tmp would affect this. Try running "nautilus" in a terminal. The icons shoud appear.

Thanks, thatls what it was. For somw unknown reason the Nautilus had disappeared form the /usr/bin directory. Re-installed from cd and desktop now woring perfectly.