Comment 27 for bug 329146

I just started experiencing this in Ubuntu 10.04 64bit.

First it started out with both my desktop icons and panels not showing up.

I fixed the panels by simply adding "gnome-panel" to the startup applications.

However the desktop icons remain missing until I manually open up a nautilus window, then the desktop icons will appear.

$ nautilus -q
(nautilus:2060): Unique-DBus-WARNING **: Error while sending message: Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)

$ ps aux | grep nautilus
jeff 2063 0.0 0.0 7616 892 pts/0 S+ 17:51 0:00 grep --color=auto nautilus

$ nautilus
Initializing nautilus-gdu extension
(Icons appear after that)

Nemes Ioan Sorin mentioned "vlc" and "samba" above which just happen to be two apps I just installed about the same time I started experiencing this problem. I'm removing those now and will test out the environment to see if that solved the problem for me.