Are we talking about the directories/folders in ~/?
But the appearance of their icons in PCManFM has not changed and shows that none of them have root:root ownership.
I think the directories described in this thread must be located somewhere else?? Or not??

yes, the folders i listed in my previous post (Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Public, Templates and Videos) were missing from my home folder.

i'm not sure what this part means. for me they didn't change. they simply didn't exist before installing and updating xdg-user-dirs.

between my post and yours no one else has mentioned running into the problem of those three folders (Documents Public Templates) being created as root:root. it may well have just been a quirk of my particular system.

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Ok, thanks for your patience. All is now well.

I closed and opened the file manager, to display ~/, and saw that all of the named directories, both in the left-hand Directory Tree panel, and the main panel -- now had the correct icons with the graphic image, displayed on each folder.

Maybe this would have happened sooner, had I thought to do a Menu->View->Reload Folder, or an f5.

In my first attempts, when I copy, link, or move one of the new folders to the Desktop directory, the special image on the icon disappears, leaving a normal-looking folder. This is when viewing the folder as Desktop content -- I'll have to see what's happening in the Desktop directory itself -- when instead viewed from PCManFM. Haven't done that yet.

Perhaps this is expected behavior and I suppose I should read through this thread again, now that I've gotten this far.

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i'm glad you got it all sorted. i am fairly boring when it comes to doing anything with themes or icon sets so i never noticed any changes in mine