My toddler was mashing keys on my netbook and now my Xfce desktop is missing. Basically, I went through every single setting in the settings manager and it appears that everything is set correctly. I should have a background image, but it doesn't appear. I should be able to right-click to get a menu, but it doesn't work. So whatever my toddler did, it's not a setting that I could find.

I ideas on what went wrong and how to fix it?

I did check and xfwm4 (Xfce's window manager) is running.

reboot?

It's already been rebooted a few times

you should try something like
in terminal to get your things back.

check out this thread:
http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=21023

that did not work

thanks for teh suggestion. Tried deleting those cache files, but no luck

Yooy's post is incorrect. There needs to be a space before the &. Thus:
But rebooting should do the same thing. I'm not really clear on exactly what the situation is. Do you boot to a console, or to an Xfce desktop that just isn't the one you had before? If the latter, have you tried to reset Xfce to defaults? You would have to redo your desktop to get everything the way it was, but it should work.

Baiscally, if I go to Settings-> Desktop. It doesn't matter if I set a background or tell it to be a solid color. It never changes the background. I also no longer am able to right-click on the desktop to get a menu even though the settings are set such I should be able to

Logout.
default. Start over.

that did redo the panels, but I still can't set the background. I pick different images and the background doesn't change. Still also can't right-click to get the xfce menu.

If I look at

/home/ermesa/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-desktop.xml

I see that the desktop background is set to the image I set. I change the image and load it again and it changes in that xml file. But the background itself does not change. It seems like something (I don't know what) is running on top of the background. That's why the background isn't changing even though XFCE4 thinks it should be changed and also why the right-clicks aren't making it through to XFCE

I tried killing everything that starts with xfce - still couldn't figure it out - none of those seem to be it.

So I've been using Linux for 10 years. I saw that so you understand that I know how to follow you comments for erasing the files in .config as you asked me to. That includes the session files you mentioned before. None of them were working despite reboots or logging in/out. So, on a whim, I enaabled the setting where it lets me choose a session on login. I created a new session and now my background is there as are the desktop icons (which I'd forgot to mention were missing). So, it's solved, but I don't know what was wrong before.

Also, I tried editing my first post to mark it as solved. Is there a way to formally do that on lq.org? Up until now I hadn't followed the practice of marking threads as solved, but I've been trying to practice better forum etiquette.