Last night I installed (full install) Fedora C9 on my laptop. Everything went smoothly. I added a few plugins to Firefox and used Yumextender to install a few programs that I needed.
This morning I booted up and logged in and found nothing but the background on the desktop. (no trash can, user directory, or even the one folder that I had placed on the desktop to log any changes (Removed\ or\ Added) I had made.
I checked the user directory (home/sam/Desktop) and the folder I placed on the desktop is there and has the information see below:

[sam@sam ~]$ ls -la Desktop
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 3 sam sam 4096 2008-07-26 08:20 .
drwx------ 36 sam sam 4096 2008-07-26 09:21 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 sam sam 302 2008-07-26 08:20 fedora-filezilla.desktop
-rw-rw-r-- 1 sam sam 8893 2008-07-25 19:37 preferred-mail-reader.desktop
drwxr-xr-x 2 sam sam 4096 2008-07-25 20:06 Removed or Added
[sam@sam ~]$

I checked another user and root logins and found the same thing in those directories. Also I try to place something on the desktop and it doesn't show up (nothing happens with a right click of the mouse or if I try to move an application from the menu to the desktop.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Sam Watson
sam@jswatson.com

Odd. I'd start by checking system and daemon logs, yum and Xorg log, users ~/.xsession.* logs for errors.

I use Debian w/ Gnome at home so it might not be the right solution, and I am not at my house so I can only give the gist of a solution, I will try to find out more at my house.

But anyways, under gconf-editor, there are multiple sections for desktop and one of them has an option like "show files on desktop" which when turned off would make all icons and mouse clicks, meaning like when you make those highlight boxes by dragging a clicked mouse across your desktop, non visible. Also, there is also apps/nautilus/desktop, which has options like "show trash" "show volumes" etc. which might also play a role in the missing trash can, home directory, etc.
But like I said, I am not at my comp and I don't use Fedora so it may not be the answer, but try and follow these guidelines and see if you can find an answer.

Hope this helps,
Kyle
#Texasone