I recently did a source build of Gnome 2.8 according to the instructions on gnome.org (really painstaking if you do it manually). Everything works fine so far except that almost no icons get shown and I also get error messages about missing icons during startup. This problem goes away when I make a symlink from /opt/gnome/share/icons to /usr/share/icons. I then did a
"grep /usr/share/icons /opt/gnome/bin/*" and found the following executables that matched:

gnome-keybinding-properties
gnome-theme-manager
gnome-theme-thumbnailer
themus-theme-applier

Are the icon paths hard coded into the executables or is it the default in some configuration file? Every package that I installed into /opt/gnome was configured with --prefix=/opt/gnome.
Or could it be the result of mix matching packages since non-gnome specific packages (i.e. libwnck, libxml2) were installed from Debian packages.

Thanks for any help,
Yale